Titbits

First up is a piece from yesterday's Guardian telling us of a national scandal, that is that getting on for a fifth of our teenagers fail to get passes in GCSE English and maths. Failure which does not bode well for their future. All this prompted, at least in part, by the work of a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter. I am reminded of my mother's belief - a teacher of secondary children of mixed ability - that there was a sizeable fraction of children - say 10% - who were not going to be usefully literate however much care and attention you poured into them. This is not to say that we can't do better than we are, rather that we should not be too ambitious. And remember that we need to provide decent employment for those who are not much good at jumping over these particular hurdles.

In which connection I might add that for some reason I did not like jumping over hurdles at all in my time at school, to the point that I knocked them down rather than attempting to go over them. Just as well that they did knock down.

This piece was followed, at the bottom of the page, by one telling of a company called Just Eat being told off for allowing images of McDonald's products to appear on the telephones of people under the age of 18. While only the day before I had read at reference 1 of this very company opening lots of new outlets. A vote of confidence in the health of our economy which is presumably to be applauded.

And to round things off, deeper inside, a piece about the dangers of eating red meat and another about the dangers of drinking alcohol. With both dangers increasing with the amount consumed. 

[Thailand’s new prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, second from right in front, with her father, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, second from left in front, and other family members in front of a portrait of King Maha Vajiralongkorn © Thai Government House/Reuters]

Then moving  back to the FT, my eye was caught by a cropped version the picture above, to be found at reference 2. I wonder how long they can hold their poses?

Curiosity aroused, I did a little poking around, to find that the clan - or dynasty - in question has not been around that long, with most of the money being less than twenty years old. While the country has been around for a long time, with roughly the same population as the UK - but which managed to escape colonisation by either the British or the French. Perhaps they both preferred that neither had it than that the other should.

Turning to the fine (physical) map of the area in the Times Atlas - I thought that there must have been a fair amount of pushing and shoving before the present boundaries stabilised. The Mekong river provides a good part of the boundary with Laos. That with Burma looks very long and very odd. While that with Cambodia is in between; Thailand stops where the highlands stop and Cambodia has the lowlands. Did the Cambodians have the same problems with the Thais over the years as we had with the Scots? Bunch of bandits from up north stealing our cows.

Thailand does get its own river though, the Chaio Phraya River of reference 3, which together with its flood plain looks to have formed the core of the old kingdom. Comes to the sea at what is now Bangkok. 

You would not know that it was hot from the snap above - but, to be fair, Street View is rather selective.

The last titbit is about private finance, the piece at reference 5, a topic last mentioned in these pages in the postscript to reference 6. All about a report, which appears to have been penned by just the sort of big engineering companies who do very well out of private finance, which is likely to say that we should have more of it. A line strengthened by the argument that it is a device widely used elsewhere in Europe and in Asia. A suggestion that what you want is good solid projects, with planing hurdles swept away and strong demand for the product. Cash cows in a word?

My starting point is that private finance is a bad thing. Public works should be publicly funded, on the national balance sheet; the public should pay, up-front, as it were. But I do wobble a bit. Is it better to have a very expensive hospital, funded on the never-never, than not to have the hospital at all? What happens when we max out on the national credit card? For which think Truss & Kwarteng. Have we really taken on board the lessons of the near-forgotten Carillion mess? For which see reference 7.

PS 1: I learn from reference 3 that while Thailand might not have been invaded and colonised, they did employ Brits to run their mapping and mines departments, perhaps others too. Perhaps there was an agreement with the French about parity in such matters.

PS 2: more trouble with avif files. The version in the FT is cropped, but when you download it you get the two crops back. Provided that you remember that File Explorer does not update the thumbnails in the way that it does with most images, so if you recycle a file name, as I do, the file is invisible. As it is to Blogger anyway.

References

Reference 1: McDonald’s to open 200 new restaurants in UK and Ireland: Fast-food chain and its franchisees to invest £1bn in expanding on high street - Eri Sugiura, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 2: Thailand’s Shinawatra clan is back in power but for how long: New premier Paetongtarn has averted a political crisis but faces the same risks that doomed her father and aunt’s governments - A. Anantha Lakshmi, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chao_Phraya_River.

Reference 4: Establishment ‘lawfare’ is holding back Thailand’s economy: The return of the Shinawatra dynasty is, sadly, no triumph for democracy - Financial Times - 2024. A late update from the editorial board.

Reference 5: UK needs Europe-style private funding for transport projects, review says: Improved infrastructure required to plug productivity ‘gap’ across country - Jennifer Williams, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/circulo-populare.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carillion.