Ever wondered when the tea bag was invented? Well, it was born in that well-known tea
drinking nation, the United States of America! It first appeared in 1904
as a hand-sewn silk bag marketed by Thomas Sullivan in New York. It was
intended that the tea be removed for brewing, but customers soon discovered
that a perfectly acceptable cup of tea could be produced by immersing the bag
with its contents. Tea bags have been
produced using linen, muslin, paper and string. Thanks to Fortnum and
Mason for this information! They sell
some fine tea and often have interesting information such as this printed in
the box.
I love sandwiches but my wife has never been a great fan. The origins of the modern sandwich appear to date from the 18th century. The first written usage of the English word appeared in Edward Gibbon's journal, referring to "bits of cold meat" as a "Sandwich". It was named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century English aristocrat. It is said that he ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread, and others began to order "the same as Sandwich!" It is commonly said that Lord Sandwich was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue playing cards, particularly cribbage, while eating, without using a fork, and without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands. Or in today’s language, you can eat a sandwich and continue to read your emails and play World of Warcraft. However, the origins of the humble sandwich may be far older as the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder is said to have wrapped meat from the Pascal lamb and bitter herbs between two pieces of old-fashioned soft matzah, flat, unleavened bread, during Passover in the manner of a modern sandwich wrap made with flatbread. Hillel the Elder was born around 30BC, making our humble sandwich over 2,000 years old! Okay so I said my wife is not keen on them. Well, at the airport the other day we went to Pret (my favourite) and she had a Pret Club sandwich. It was so good that it is the first sandwich she had ever finished in her life. Well done Pret! The humble sandwich is increasingly becoming a less humble, more sophisticated dish, sometimes closer to haute cuisine and eaten with knife and fork.
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I was pleased to see my only real teenage pop music
hero win a Brit Award this
month. David Bowie at 67 years old is
the oldest person ever to win one. He is far too cool to accept in
person, so he got the model Kate Moss to do so on his behalf, wearing his original
Ziggy Stardust costume from his 1972 Rainbow Concert. And even better, Bowie
managed to make a political statement in his acceptance speech with Moss saying
on his behalf ‘Scotland stay with us’. Well done David! I expect other celebrities will follow his
lead.
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| Kate Moss collects award on behalf of Bowie |
For years (about 20 to be exact) I have battled my
way through the rush-hour traffic into central Oxford to take the First Great Western
train into London Paddington. More recently I have taken to walking to the
station as it is quicker but that doesn’t help with the train reliability. Or I should say unreliability. In the recent wet weather, there have been 60
minute delays in the Didcot area and the signals have not been working around
Maidenhead meaning there has been no service between Reading and
Paddington. Even when there is no
weather to blame, I always feel that a minor miracle has taken place if I get
into Paddington no more than 10 minutes behind schedule. Fortunately I don’t go to London every day,
usually no more than once or twice a week.
Oh and the peak time ticket is £58 excluding tube (bargain I hear you
say). Well I have long known that the
Chiltern Line is the most reliable and the best rated by passengers in the
country so I have started to use it more often.
I can drive 20 minutes north to Bicester and catch it there. It is less expensive, more reliable and
quicker! The scheduled time is up to 15
minutes faster (46 minutes journey time) but as they are almost always on time
or early the real journey time is much shorter. (Yes, I go 20 minutes North to take a train
South and get there much quicker). And in summer 2015 they will open a new parkway
station just North of Oxford with direct rains to London. This will be the first new railway from a UK
city to London in over 100 years! Can’t
wait.
Channel 5 hosted a programme last month which they
called the ‘Great British Immigration
Row’. Their objective was clearly to improve their viewing figures and I
expect they succeeded. This was a fiery,
heated, provocative debate or argument, with a selection of ‘expert’ panellists
invited as well as members of the audience who were allowed to say a few words. The members of the audience were on the whole
far more sane than many of the speakers C5 had invited. Sun columnist and former Apprentice ‘star’
Katie Hopkins was no doubt invited to heat up the proceedings. That she certainly did with her relentless
attacks and inability to let anyone else get a word in. Even the Daily Star (that fine newspaper)
launched a campaign to get her banned from TV last year! They also interviewed a muslin fundamentalist
who refuses to condemn the killers of Lee Rigby. Again, surely this was to make good TV as it
is hard to see how this is directly connected with immigration. But in between all the drama and viewing
stewing, there was actually some good debate and I really enjoyed it. It seems to me that immigration is essential
to our country for the following reasons: we are an aging population and there
will be no one to pay our old age pensions unless we get more younger people in
working; we should always encourage bright qualified people to come to our
country; we should allow businesses to recruit the very best people from across
the world and not just limit them in every case to the local population. This will
help ensure we build world-class businesses and organisations that will prosper,
grow and pay more taxes. Kelvin
MacKenzie (former editor of The Sun) said he was in favour of immigration (that
did surprise me) but that immigrants should not have access to the NHS for a
certain period of time (measured in years).
This is populism at its worst.
How can we allow people into the UK and then deny them healthcare when
they need it? This is inhuman and surely breaches Human Rights. No to health tourism of course, but we must
look after anyone we elect to allow into the country. That’s the British way. Professor Tipu Aziz was in the audience. He is from Bangladesh and arrived in Britain
at the age of 17 with just three O-levels. Now he is a neurosurgeon at the
JR in Oxford. When asked how many lives
he had saved in the UK he said ‘thousands’.
A Big Yes to immigration as it clearly does us far more good than bad. What a shame that the political parties still
prefer to try to outdo each other their tougher that you stance on immigration
and that only The Economist has come out and said Immigration is good not bad.
We all know that the last five years have been
amongst the worst ever economically, and certainly the worst in living memory. Many people are still suffering as a
result. It started in Wall Street and
The City in 2008. The second phase was
the Eurozone crisis and we have been gradually recovering, very very slowly
since. However, there are some who say a
third crash is going to drag us all back: the Chinese Economy. Below is an article written by the BBC’s
Robert Peston. When you read it, it is
hard to disagree with him that all is not well in China.
Chinese economy: 3rd
crash?
Unless you are an aficionado of the great moments
of Chinese Communist history, you probably won't have heard of Wuhan (it is the site
of Chairman Mao's legendary swim across the Yangtze). But perhaps more than any other Chinese city,
it tells the story of how China's remarkable three decades of modernisation and
enrichment, its economic miracle, is apparently drawing to a close, and why
there is a serious risk of a calamitous crash.
In Wuhan I interviewed a mayor, Tang Liangzhi, whose funds and power
would make London's mayor, Boris Johnson, feel sick with envy. He is spending
£200bn over five years on a redevelopment plan whose aim is to make Wuhan -
which already has a population of 10 million - into a world mega city and a
serious challenger to Shanghai as China's second city. The rate of infrastructure spending in Wuhan
alone is comparable to the UK's entire expenditure on renewing and improving
the fabric of the country. In this single city, hundreds of apartment blocks,
ring roads, bridges, railways, a complete subway system and a second
international airport are all being constructed. The middle of town is being demolished to
create a high tech commercial centre. It will include a £3bn skyscraper that
will be more than 600m high (roughly double the height of London's Shard) and
either the second or third tallest in the world (I met executives of the state
owned developers, Greenland, who were coy about precisely how tall it would
finally be). And, of course, the point
of my visit to Wuhan was to tell a broader story. Over the past few years,
China has built a new skyscraper every five days, more than 30 airports, metros
in 25 cities, the three longest bridges in the world, more than 6,000 miles of
high speed railway lines, 26,000 miles of motorway, and both commercial and
residential property developments on a mind-boggling scale.
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| Wuhan |
Third wave
Now there are two ways of looking at a remaking of
the landscape that would have daunted Egypt's pharaohs and the Romans. It is,
of course, a necessary modernisation of a rapidly urbanising country. But it is
also symptomatic of an unbalanced economy whose recent sources of growth are
not sustainable. Perhaps the big point
of the film I have made, to be screened on Tuesday (How China Fooled the World, BBC2, 9pm)
is that the economic slowdown evident in China, coupled with recent
manifestations of tension in its financial markets, can be seen as the third
wave of the global financial crisis which began in 2007-08 (the first wave was
the Wall Street and City debacle of 2007-08; the second was the eurozone
crisis). Why do I say that? Well in the autumn of 2008, after the
collapse of Lehman, there was a sudden and dramatic shrinkage of world trade.
And that was catastrophic for China, whose growth was largely generated by
exporting to the rich West all that stuff we craved. When our economies went
bust, we stopped buying - and almost overnight, factories turned off the power,
all over China. I visited China at the
time and witnessed mobs of poor migrant workers packing all their possessions,
including infants, on their backs and heading back to their villages. It was
alarming for the government, and threatened to smash the implicit contract
between the ruling Communist Party and Chinese people - namely, that they give
up their democratic rights in order to become richer. So with encouragement from the US government
(we interviewed the then US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson), the Chinese
government unleashed a stimulus programme of mammoth scale: £400bn of direct
government spending, and an instruction to the state-owned banks to "open
their wallets" and lend as if there were no tomorrow. Which, in one sense, worked. While the
economies of much of the rich West and Japan stagnated, boom times returned to
China - growth accelerated back to the remarkable 10% annual rate that the
country had enjoyed for 30 years. But
the sources of growth changed in an important way, and would always have a
limited life.
Toxic investment
There are two ways of seeing this. First, even before the great stimulus, China
was investing at a faster rate than almost any big country in history. Before
the crash, investment was the equivalent of about 40% of GDP, around three
times the rate in most developed countries and significantly greater even than
what Japan invested during its development phase - which preceded its bust of
the early 1990s. After the crash, thanks
to the stimulus and the unleashing of all that construction, investment surged to an unprecedented
50% of GDP, where it has more or less stayed. Here is the thing: when a big economy is
investing at that pace to generate wealth and jobs, it is a racing certainty
that much of it will never generate an economic return, that the investment is
way beyond what rational decision-making would have produced. That is why in China, there are vast
residential developments and even a whole city where the lights are never on
and why there are gleaming motorways barely tickled by traffic. But what makes much of the spending and
investment toxic is the way it was financed: there has been an explosion of
lending. China's debts as a share of GDP have been rising at a very rapid rate
of around 15% of GDP, or national output, annually and have increased since
2008 from around 125% of GDP to 200%. The
analyst Charlene Chu, late of Fitch, gave a resonant synoptic description of
this credit binge: "Most people
are aware we've had a credit boom in China but they don't know the scale. At
the beginning of all of this in 2008, the Chinese banking sector was roughly
$10 trillion in size. Right now it's in the order of $24 to $25 trillion. "That incremental increase of $14 to $15
trillion is the equivalent of the entire size of the US commercial banking sector,
which took more than a century to build. So that means China will have
replicated the entire US system in the span of half a decade."
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| Wuhan in Winter. Or is it Bournemouth? |
Anyone living in the rich West does not need a
lecture on the perils of a financial system that creates too much credit too
quickly. And in China's case, as was dangerously true in ours, a good deal of
the debt is hidden, in specially created, opaque and largely financial
institutions which we've come to call "shadow" banks. There are no exceptions to the lessons of financial
history: lending at that rate leads to debtors unable to meet their
obligations, and to large losses for creditors; the question is not whether
this will happen but when, and on what scale.
Which is why we've seen a couple of episodes of stress and tension in
China's banking markets over the past nine months, as a possible augury of
worse to come.
Slowing growth
More broadly, for the economy as a whole, when
growth is generated over a longish period by debt-fuelled investment or
spending, there can be one of two outcomes.
If the boom is deflated early enough and in a controlled way, and
measures are taken to reconstruct the economy so that growth can be generated
in a sustainable way, the consequence would be an economic slowdown, but
disaster would be averted. But if
lending continues at breakneck pace, then a crash becomes inevitable. So what will happen to China's economic
miracle? Well, the Chinese government
has announced economic reforms, which - in theory - would over a period of
years rebalance the economy away from debt-fuelled investment towards
consumption by Chinese people. Charles
Liu, a prominent Chinese investor, with close links to the government in
Beijing, explained to me how far China's growth rate is likely to fall from the
current 7-8%: "I think China could
do very well if the quality of the growth is transformed to higher value
add." He said. "You're really looking at 4% is fine." But as yet the reforms are at a very early
stage of implementation, and the lending boom goes on. What is more, the
current building splurge so enriches many thousands of communist officials,
from a system of institutionalised kickbacks, that there are concerns about the
ability of the central government to force the changes through. Also, the social and political consequences
of Charles Liu's 4% growth could be profound: it is unclear whether that is a
fast enough rate to satisfy the people's hunger for jobs and higher living
standards, whether it is fast enough to prevent widespread protest and unrest. And what if the lending and investing bonanza
can't be staunched? Then we would be looking at the kind of crash that would
shake not just China, but the globe. The
biggest story of my career has been the rise and rise of China. Hungry,
fast-growing China has shaped our lives, sometimes but not always to our
benefit. It boosted our living
standards, by selling us all those material things we simply had to have,
cheaper and cheaper. But its exporters killed many of our manufacturers. And
the financial surpluses it generated translated into our dangerous deficits,
the secular and risky rise of indebtedness in much of the West. Also its appetite has led to huge increases
in the price we all pay for food, for energy, for commodities. What's more,
China's influence in Asia and Africa has profoundly shifted the global balance
of power. So would an economically
weakened China be good for us in the West? Well, it wouldn't necessarily be all
bad.
But a China suddenly incapable of providing the
rising living standards its people now see as their destiny would be less
confident, less stable, and - perhaps for the world - more dangerous.
Robert Peston, BBC Business News Editor, February
2014.
And, as ever, I am going to end this month’s blog
with a quote:
“L’art de l’imposition consiste à plumer l’oie pour
obtenir le plus possible de plumes avec le moins possible de cris” Jean-Baptiste Colbert
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the
goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible
amount of hissing”
Colbert
was the French Finance Minister under Louis XIV in the 17th century
just prior to the French Revolution. Generally regarded as hard-working and
brilliant, even he could not raise money fast enough to satisfy the King’s
extreme extravagance. Some things don’t
change that much. Different system, same
problem?
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| Colbert born Reims 1619 died Paris 1683 |
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