Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Those certainly seem to be good things on the whole, but what seemed very clear as the Queen’s speech ran on was that, by and large, it was a case of cancelling out just about every major piece of legislation that Labour has put through over the last 13 years or so.

Out goes the all-time black hole of expense which would have been ID cards and in comes the related limits on the DNA database and restrictions on CCTV. It’s nice to see that the big brother state is being rolled back in very concrete ways; hopefully they’ll rail back on some of the other less than libertarian ideas of the security services too.

Freedom of choice comes back to schooling with academies and to local authorities with more powers being devolved to them. Devolution in another form becomes safer through blocks on more powers being taken by Europe. Rolling back the state continues through reductions in the number of quangos and giving health professionals more say in the basic decision making.

Welfare reform is promised which is interesting as it’s something that the Conservatives have historically been scared of doing.

Pensions get some attention by regaining the link to earnings (good) and raising the state retirement age (not so good). Very good is the final acceptance that the government had a lot to do with the fall of Equitable Life and therefore should be paying compensation: this will take ages I’m sure and will definitely be complex as many of those due compensation have died.

A rather short speech which introduces a veritable mountain of legislation.

Saturdays seem to be getting busier and busier for us as it seems like every activity you want to do ends up being scheduled for some time on a Saturday. Thus, we found ourselves on the go pretty much non-stop from about 9.30 through to almost 6pm today.

For the usual reasons (ie religion), Sunday never gets even half so busy as even the least busy Saturday. Whilst may deride the “day of rest” aspect as being totally out of touch with modern society, we’re finding increasingly that we need that day of rest. Granted, we don’t drop all activities on Sundays but we generally end up with something like a half-day at minimum unallocated time.

Today on the other hand was truly manic! Since it was the day for my biology class it meant an early start for the kids with their Kumon which did have the upside that they’d a longer gap between that and the football. However, after football it was off to an audition so we ended up on the go ’til after 6pm: longer than a normal work-day!

Tomorrow is Wendy’s birthday so our normal schedule (OK, ragbag collection of things that we end up doing) will be thrown up in the air although I suspect that most of the birthday activities will take place in the morning and evening.

One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.

Much as most people like their summer holidays and many of those expect to be flying to somewhere in Spain, there’s major uncertainty this year thanks to the Icelandic volcano.

So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.

Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?