Where compassion quotients run out

Having just returned from a short trip to Birmingham, where my daughter set up this site for us, I thought we had better get started. Over the weekend much was made in the papers of the Times Rich List, the motivation for which seems to be found somewhere in a combination of envy, prurience and the celebrity culture. Of course the dastardly plans of the Chancellor to bring in a draconian rate of 50p in the pound for earnings over £150,000 also featured, along with the recession’s ( when does ‘depression’ become the correct term?) effect on the capital values of rich peoples assets.

I cannot say I felt any sorrow for the less rich , and talk of such people leaving the country led me to feel that perhaps if they are that fickle with regard to their residence then perhaps we should do without them anyway. One commentator claimed that, ‘… you do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer'. Surely, it should have been ‘…by making the rich less rich’. As a mere amateur and a fully paid up citizen perhaps I should have been stunned into silence by the utterance of a professional ( some journalists, you may have noticed, despise the rise of the amateur commentator by means of a blog) but in hard times I cant help feeling that those with loads of money should be expected to pull their weight like the rest of us, as the new age of austerity bites. At least the rich will not be out of a job or out of a home.

Although the view persists among some quarters that the rural communities are littered with rich farmers and minor aristocracy, the truth is that per capita incomes are generally low. Take for example the report in the Independent back in 1999 (27/4), where Ben Gill of the National Farmers Union was reported as saying that hill farmer’s incomes were likely to be no more than £5300 per annum. Things certainly haven’t got better and the drift out of the industry continues. ( listen to BBC radio 4 Farming Today for this continuing theme) Farming is a tough life which has to be conducted against everything nature can throw at you including the inevitable outbreaks of disease. The foot and mouth outbreak has left permanent damage, and TB continues to cost the tax payer millions. Sooner or later our upland areas will start to decline as the industry which formed and maintained it will have gone. Visual amenity will not be the only thing lost. So those of you out there not on the Rich List (national average income of £ 521 per week for men and £412 for women: National Statistics 2008) might be tempted to cast your eyes up to the hills and to heights of riches, and ponder.

We could of course phase out livestock farming, but that is a theme which will be returned to if I manage to keep turning on the computer.

Dacier