Verbal

So the Banana Boat Song then.

One thing that takes some adjusting to is the vastly different crime rates in South Africa. The murder rate is 1.2 deaths per 100,000 in the UK and 32 deaths per 100,000 in South Africa. SA also has some of the highest rates child and baby rapes in the world, and about a quarter of all South Africans men (by survey) have admitted raping someone, and nearly half of those have admitted raping more than once. SA has, not surprisingly, the highest recorded rate of HIV infection. South Africa has always struck me as a rather sad place, outside of the tourist and wealthy colonies like Camps Bay in Cape Town. Cape town also has the largest slum in South Africa - Khayelisha. If you have the nerve to go there (and it is a pretty scary place) the scars of apartheid are still apparent - including the presence of the oppressive watchtowers/firing positions that the apartheid-era police used to suppress trouble in the township. Khayelisha is a fetid, dank horror of a place - created by the 'Group Areas Act' in the 50s and expanded massively by ANC local politicians in a cynical move to outflank the power base of the Democratic Alliance. Among many young township dwellers, the drug of choice is something called tik, a kind of super-potent crystal meth that keeps you wide awake, hypes up violent behaviour, and causes awful disfigurement (a kind of amped-up 'meth mouth'). Johannesburg is now a city of walls. Where once the wealthier neighbourhoods had lush lawns stretching down to the road, now there are high concrete screens around all the houses, many with CCTV and barbed wire. It feels like a city under siege. One of the oddities of the city - again probably a hangover from apartheid - is the absence of pavements along the streets, which makes all the roadside grass verges look like black-only areas. And the city's trains are no-go areas for whites as well as dangerous as hell for anyone who uses them. I'm not saying you can't have a pleasant experience as a tourist, or as a resident in some of the traditionally white-only neighbourhoods. But even these little oases can be invaded with a level of violence that is hard to imagine, let alone describe. Just an alternative perspective to that of the happy clappers... Personally, I'm not sure I feel particularly optimistic about change in SA. The ANC will dominate for years to come, but there are simply no politicians within it of Mandela's capabilities or vision - not even close. And what SA needs now more than anything is a group that are younger versions of Mandela, who can push the country further away from its terrible past. The issue of 'white South Africa' (!), or white flight as it's known there, is but a small symptom of the far larger problem.

One thing that takes some adjusting to is the vastly different crime rates in South Africa. The murder rate is 1.2 deaths per 100,000 in the UK and 32 deaths per 100,000 in South Africa. SA also has some of the highest rates child and baby rapes in the world, and about a quarter of all South Africans men (by survey) have admitted raping someone, and nearly half of those have admitted raping more than once. SA has, not surprisingly, the highest recorded rate of HIV infection. South Africa has always struck me as a rather sad place, outside of the tourist and wealthy colonies like Camps Bay in Cape Town. Cape town also has the largest slum in South Africa - Khayelisha. If you have the nerve to go there (and it is a pretty scary place) the scars of apartheid are still apparent - including the presence of the oppressive watchtowers/firing positions that the apartheid-era police used to suppress trouble in the township. Khayelisha is a fetid, dank horror of a place - created by the 'Group Areas Act' in the 50s and expanded massively by ANC local politicians in a cynical move to outflank the power base of the Democratic Alliance. Among many young township dwellers, the drug of choice is something called tik, a kind of super-potent crystal meth that keeps you wide awake, hypes up violent behaviour, and causes awful disfigurement (a kind of amped-up 'meth mouth'). Johannesburg is now a city of walls. Where once the wealthier neighbourhoods had lush lawns stretching down to the road, now there are high concrete screens around all the houses, many with CCTV and barbed wire. It feels like a city under siege. One of the oddities of the city - again probably a hangover from apartheid - is the absence of pavements along the streets, which makes all the roadside grass verges look like black-only areas. And the city's trains are no-go areas for whites as well as dangerous as hell for anyone who uses them. I'm not saying you can't have a pleasant experience as a tourist, or as a resident in some of the traditionally white-only neighbourhoods. But even these little oases can be invaded with a level of violence that is hard to imagine, let alone describe. Just an alternative perspective to that of the happy clappers... Personally, I'm not sure I feel particularly optimistic about change in SA. The ANC will dominate for years to come, but there are simply no politicians within it of Mandela's capabilities or vision - not even close. And what SA needs now more than anything is a group that are younger versions of Mandela, who can push the country further away from its terrible past. The issue of 'white South Africa' (!), or white flight as it's known there, is but a small symptom of the far larger problem.

You mean like the largely private health care system in the US? Where 50 million Americans are uninsured and therefore denied any but basic palliative care? And where a QUARTER of all retired people in the US declare themselves bankrupt because of medical fees? Where rates of infant mortality, disability, deaths from injuries, heart and lung disease, etc. are the highest in the western world? And yet where the mostly private system costs, per capita, $8233, compared with the state system in the UK costing $3433? This knee-jerk assumption that private = low cost and public = high cost is not only demonstrably false, but has been imposed in the US at a terrible price to the health of its citizens.

So, yes, the figure for overall government spending in 2011 should be around £721 billion. I've fired my statistician and made sure she has no access to education, welfare or health care for the remainder of her life. Well, no they're not - because Hong Kong is not a country and Pakistan's government spending (mostly on its useless, corrupt military) is around 20% of GDP not 48-50%. Which brings us back to my question, which you seem to have avoided for a rather long time: how do you propose to cut that percentage from 50% to 20% without simply abandoning altogether many things that constitute a civilised society, like ALL public education, ALL publicly funded welfare, ALL publicly funded health care or ALL publicly funded pensions? I suspect the reason you won't answer is you realise that such a proposal is a bit ridiculous, to put it mildly.

Well for a start, it isn't a country! It isn't even a city-state like Singapore (which has govt borrowing at 111% of GDP). And even if we were to start considering either, the real comparison is obviously not, say, Hong Kong vs the UK, but London vs HK. But let's get back to the question I asked you. You say how desirable and wonderful it would be if we were to cut the proportion of government spending to GDP from close to 50% to 20%. So what choices are you going to make to cut 30% from government spending. Here are some helpful stats, all for projected spending in 2014: Total government spend: £1717 billion or about 48% of GDP Of which: Pensions: £144 billion or 20% of govt spending Health care: £130 billion or 18% Welfare: £116 billion or 16% Education: £99 billion or 14% Defence: £45 billion or 6% So, as I said earlier, to cut 30% you'd need to abandon, for example, ALL publicly funded health care AND all publicly funded education - or mix-and-match by cutting ALL defence spending and hiring some doctors on motorbikes or something instead of hospitals. You do the maths. In the meantime, here (on 2011 figures) are the countries with government spending at 20% or less of GDP (excluding city states and offshore tax havens): Bangladesh Burma Cambodia Cameroon Central African Republic Ivory Coast Dominican Republic El Salvador Ethiopia Guatemala Guinea Haiti Indonesia Laos Madagascar Nepal Pakistan Panama Paraguay Peru Philippines Taiwan Thailand Togo Turkmenistan Uganda Taken together, it's not a pretty picture. But which one provides you with your ideal spending model? And where are you going to make your 30% cuts?

That all seems reasonable enough. I've spent a lot of time in a country which has that percentage (actually 19.3%). You'd be right at home there. However, Pakistan is a developing country on the brink of being a failed state, has no universal education system to speak of, nor a health system that does any more than stick a second-hand band-aid on to whatever injury or illness you have. It has some of the largest slums in South Asia and some of the most extreme poverty you'll ever see (only parts of India are worse). In the developed world, even the US the government spending close to twice your magic 20%, and that's with the bare minimum of a public health service, much more highly restricted welfare payments and a generally failing public education system. So you've got some big choices to make, and I'd like to hear what they are. To get down to 20%, you'd need to abandon universal health care entirely, abandon free and universal education for all under 18, and chop welfare down to workhouse levels. You MIGHT be able to offset some of the damage by disbanding the UK's air force, army and navy. So what's it to be - to create your wonderful, Pakistan-like world in which the "individual as the freedom to choose how to spend their money"?

I think you meant to put a question mark on the end. In any case, no I've not lived there. Now how about you answer my question? On the issue of violence, I've worked in SA with multi-ethnic crews and all reported horrific examples of violence either to themselves or members of their families. The most ironic instance was a crew member who'd worked on a film that starts with a carjacking. On his way to the airport to pick up an Oscar in LA, he was - guess what? - carjacked. Which is why I regard the OP as extremely careless, to say the least. Violence has afflicted the lives of everyone there, not just whites. And it is not - for heaven's sake - "White South Africa".

Where on earth did you get the idea that 'apartheid' was a word made up by the ANC? I can only find references to that on racist websites like Stormfront. It's an Afrikaans word meaning 'separate-ness' and enshrined (if that's the word) in South African law in 1948. As for Mandela, he was imprisoned as a leading member of the ANC, and gave up the unarmed struggle against the Whites-only regime immediately after the Sharpeville massacre, in which white police shot dead 69 blacks and injured scores more. He was sentenced initially for organising a strike and leaving the country without travel documents. While in prison, he was then charged, two years later, with four counts of sabotage of government targets. Blacks had been disenfranchised, evicted from their land and dumped into barren 'bantustans', their children denied access to decent education or health care, and left with land too poor to support sustainable agriculture. Once thriving centres of modern black culture like Sophiaville were wiped out. Pacifist opponents had already been imprisoned and tortured. The regime had been declared illegal by the international community and subject to UN sanctions. I'm curious as to what you think the alternative was to armed struggle against a violently racist regime? If you were black under apartheid, had had your friends shot, imprisoned and killed, and your family had been evicted from their legally held home and chucked into the scorched-earth bantustans, what would you do? Hold up a placard asking politely if the regime wouldn't mind desisting, thank you so much?

It is odd how dull-minded Toryism is the mirror-image of Karl Marx. Capitalism in this joint mindset is a throwback to the early nineteenth century, with free-spirited entrepreneurs inventing spinning jennys and flying shuttles, and changing the world with their inspired wealth-creating skills, unfettered by undeserving Bob Cratchits. For Marx, the Cratchits would eventually rise up; for the Saintsweb business emperors, the Cratchits can just make do with the 5000% payday loans. Actual capitalism - you know, the stuff that happens in the real world instead of this quaint fantasy - runs as a dependant of the state. The biggest collective sponger of the public sector is the private sector. How do you think G4S became the biggest security firm in Europe? (And WISDOM? ****ing hell!! Who was it again who came to the rescue of G4S at the 2012 Olympics?). How do you think the drugs companies, pushing their wares at massively inflated prices, make their money in the UK? How do the cost-overunning, state-fleecing defence contractors get paid? And so on and on and on.

Badger is right. The ONS is clearly not independent. This doesn't mean that the organisation is full of poor statisticians. Far from it. But they can only measure according to the parameters set by their political masters, and these are subject to manipulation. The most infamous instance of this was when Thatcher ordered that unemployment be redefined in the 1980s to reduce the total. As with all statistics, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out - and Thatcher, a scientist, was good at this kind of manipulative crap, riding roughshod over the objections of the statisticians themselves. The reworking of the calculations on GDP moved the key numbers back from small minuses to zero. In the bigger picture, it's neither here nor there. The far more telling point is that Gideon is chasing the economy's tail in a downward spiral. More cuts will drag the economy down, which will entail more cuts, and so on, ad nauseum. Still, it'll give him the chance to scoff gourmet burgers while scapegoating yet more of the great unwashed. And by the way, you hardly covered yourself in glory by refusing to take the bet.

Jeez, dealing with you people is like playing swivel-eyed Whack-A-Mole. If it's not Lord Tender and his "everyone but me is a pseudo-intellectual (including people who've won the Nobel Prize. Twice)", it's Lord Whatabout and the scraps of garbage from Tory Central Office recycled here. Anyway, to answer your question: where do I start? The abolition of the 10p rate for-low income earners? The catastrophic renegotiation of the GPs' contracts? The intention to bring in the Snooper's Charter? Honestly, I could go on and on about such a craven Labour leadership. The problem, Lord W, is that you share with all Party apparatchiks that kind of shiny-faced optimism that comes with the unquestioning faith you place in major Party "policies". Back in the 80s I used to have to attend all the major Party conferences and they were filled with people who look and act exactly like that dimwit with the guybrows in The Apprentice. They're all like ****ing secular Scientologists. There really is something deeply perverse in being a slavish devotee of a Party line. And tell Johnny B I'll be back to deal with him later. I'm out of posts, dammit.

Ah, I'm impressed - you know your US military open days. Actually, neither, because I was there with a pretty eminent American physicist, and we got what we thought was an exclusive VIP tour - until a bunch of Russian higher-ups floated down by helicopter, jumped out, quickly took photos of themselves and flew back off again.

I've stood on the precise spot, at Trinity, New Mexico, where the first atom bomb test was conducted. Quite a shallow crater (it was blown up from a high tower) and not even much evidence of the blast radius, but the Geiger counter clicked so fast that you heard more of a hum than a serious of pings. No one's allowed to stay there for more than a few minutes.

Well if you supported Chelsea with all that stuff you'd get some very odd looks.

Whataboutery doesn't work with me, Ducky. I'm not a Labour voter. Nor do ad hominem attacks on Wren-Lewis. Why don't you take a minute to actually read his piece? It's quite a revelation for those parroting the Tory/rightwing press mantra.

Peddling this rubbish again and again doesn't make it true. To quote Simon Wren-Lewis, professor in economics at Merton College, Oxford, "the idea that the last Labour government seriously mismanaged the nation’s finances is a myth." Facts are here, if you dare to look (and try to understand): http://mainlymacro.blogspot.ca/2013/06/must-we-live-with-post-truth-media.html While bankers should be doing serious jail time, their apologists keep warbling about how it was all Brown's fault really. I'm afraid it's nothing but a feeble lie. If you're not a banker yourself, stop genuflecting to the real incompetent, greedy ****wits whose vast personal fortunes we as taxpayers will be subsiding for decades to come.

I do hope we have more of this - sheer footballing genius. (I wish I could quote some of it, but all you'd see is **** *** **** *** *********!!) http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/oct/03/newcastleunited.premierleague

This is confusing a whole number of separate problems. The proxy war in Afghanistan financed the Mujahadeen in the skirmishes with the Soviets. These were led by such figures as Ahmad Shad Massoud, the 'Lion of Panjshir'. Massoud was arguably the very first victim of 9/11, having been murdered the previous day in Afghanistan by two Al Qaeda operatives masquerading as TV journalists. Massoud received copious amounts of money from the CIA. Bin Laden and his rabble did not. They were financed by the Saudis - and in fact Bin Laden himself was an agent of Saudi intelligence. The Saudis poured money into Bin Laden's jihadists, but in the war with the Soviet occupation forces they were worse than useless. Only when the warlords who took over from the Soviet occupiers turned the country into blood-soaked dust did the Taliban - a creation of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service - sweep in and grab power. By the time (1996) the Taliban had captured Kabul, they were serving Pakistan's regional interests in the same way that the ISI-sponsored jihadists were in Kashmir. Al Qaeda was formed later that year, with an alliance of Bin Laden's and Zawahiri's quite separate gangs. They settled in Afghanistan, if not with ISI assistance, then at least with their connivance. By this time, Bin Laden's paymasters in Riyadh had got cold feet, and tried to neutralise him. Too late. an uneasy pact had been drawn up with the Taliban. Where Iran fits into this heaven only knows. Pakistan, the Taliban and the former Mujahadeen were all Sunni Muslims and therefore implacably opposed to the Shia-ism of the Ayatollahs. Anyway, the bottom line is you have three powers - the Americans, the Saudis and Pakistan - all pursuing their interests and shovelling their money at quite different groups who at different times have rule Afghanistan. The Iranians are the one regional power to have been singularly unsuccessful in installing their guys in power in Kabul.

You should really ask someone who's in the military, Brett. They'll probably tell you the difference between full-scale invasion and funnelling weapons and supplies to rebels.

In one maybe less obvious sense, Orwell’s 1984 is out of date, because in the novel the proles – the majority of the population – were allowed to work themselves to death outside of state surveillance. But what we have now is total surveillance, at least in the sense that anyone at all can come to the attention of ‘security’ by keying strokes into a keyboard that can act as a tripwire not just for terrorism or violent crime, but for anything the security services decide they want to monitor. And what they watch can be changed almost in an instant, without the need for warrants or oversight because it is done in the name of a generalised ‘intelligence-gathering’ – profiling of an entire population. So the model for this kind of pervasive watching, in which major online multinationals collude, is not 1984, but an electronic version of the total surveillance of the East German Stasi – an intelligence and security institution designed to be so vast that it could watch everyone within its borders. As forerunners of online monitoring, the Stasi were world experts on typewriters – able to trace the source of anti-State pamphlets or pieces of samizdat to a single incriminating machine. On the other hand, we shouldn’t sink into the assumption that the monitoring state is all-powerful and always able to get its intelligence right. We already have a sense of this with ‘targeted’ google ads which frequently draw bizarrely wrong conclusions about people’s age, sex, interests, etc.) In any case, the history of the internet has always been that of a struggle between a freedom to say whatever you want vs state monitoring and control. And actually no one has won that battle yet – even the Chinese state fails to contain a huge number of independent-minded bloggers and activists. So if Chinese dissidents can keep their collective voices heard without being flattened, I’m sure we can manage. And there WILL be a pushback from internet-freedom advocates - new ideas and new technologies. Or we could all buy typewriters.

Oh I think in this case it's quite an easy line to draw. Whatever we may think of the Bradley Manning case, it was clearly the leak of substantive classified information of a highly sensitive nature, including, at its worst, caught-on-camera indiscriminate murder. Snowden, on the other hand, has not, as far as I know, revealed a single state secret that might have been gleaned from all the communications intercepts and data harvesting done by the NSA. All he has done is reveal that such massive, probably illegal harvesting goes on, that it is done secretly and with the collusion of the "do No Evil" internet giants. He has not compromised any NSA or CIA or FBI investigation, but merely made public an intelligence-gathering process that is aimed far wider than at terrorists and criminals. Incidentally, what's happened is another splendid argument for our remaining in the EU. While the coalition government maintains its traditional pusillanimous cringe to US hegemony, the EU is considering legal action to prosecute and prevent this kind of massive private data-harvesting. When our rights to the privacy of our data are secretly infringed by NSA and GCHQ collusion, we can hardly expect the British government to stand up for us. The EU, on the other hand, is doing just that.

Wow! You've gone straight to number 38! Very good. Now let's get down to business. As you have refused to do the homework I've set you, and prefer instead to rely on the dubious and evidently waning evidence of your own sense-perceptions, why don't you back up your claims with something as dubious and controversial as...EVIDENCE! So: 1. Demonstrate, with statistics, the basis on which you arrived at the "wealthy individuals" move much less money abroad today than they did in the 1960s and 1970s. 2. Demonstrate with statistics, your contention that the "brain drain" is any different now than then (keeping in mind, of course, that draining brains and the wealthy do NOT amount to the same groups of people at all, despite your amusing assumption that they must be). 3. Demonstrate that the huge growth in inequality in the UK (and the US) is NOT connected to increased tax take from the wealthy. And keep in mind that your own impressions mean sweet FA in this argument. The above are relatively simple points of fact, IF what you say is true.

I see you've adopted number 29 in Schopenhauer's 38 Ways to Win an Argument: You need to grasp the reality of inequality in Britain, how the inequality map has changed radically in the last 40 years, and how that has a direct bearing on the greater tax take among the wealthy (who continue, of course, to hide VAST swathes of their loot in the Caymans and elsewhere so that some of them pay no tax at all!). You provide not the SLIGHTEST evidence for your fanciful assertion (the way, obviously, you want the world to be rather than any grounding in reality), and it is beside the point anyway. For your education on the general point, try reading "The Spirit Level" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. I don't think you'll find them blurting out "it's quite simple really" in that exasperated "I'm-a-thrusting-Victorian-entrepreneur (honest)" way of yours. You might also dig yourself out of a hole with Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz's "The Price of Inequality". Happy reading!

Just a word in your shell-like, Dr Pangloss. There are statistics and then there's the reality behind the statistics. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/apr/13/work-doesnt-pay-multi-part-time-employees