So just what is progress?

Inescapable advances made over the past 30 years in computing and communication technology are all around, but is there actually anything to show for it all that someone from 30 years ago could regard as progress in the UK as a whole? Is crime down? Not at all. There are no-go areas, crimes that are too commonplace to be worth investigating and fewer police visible on the streets.

Is job satisfaction increased? Apparently not. Do we feel more secure? Nope.

Is health improved? Maybe we don't get scurvy and rickets these days, but now that the antibiotics are losing their impact on increasingly resistant bacteria, the worrying incidence of TB in immigrant areas is not a good sign after it once been all but eradicated in the UK.

Is overall life expectancy increased? Technology pretty much means that money alone can keep anyone alive for impressive amounts of time; but that moral dilemma is no clearer than it ever was. As the NHS is running out of cash, who will direct resources towards the most worthy cases? After all, it's necessary to keep a few tax payers going for long enough to pay the taxes to care for the rest.

Are our political leaders any more intelligent, less easily corrupted and more inspirational? Hah - give us a break! They have rarely been more reviled, mistrusted and mocked. Ironically, and despite everything, HM continues to elicit a generally good response from her subjects.

So then, are we any better off? We are certainly fatter and more slovenly. The domination of business by computerisation means that youth continues to sideline old age and experience.

We can certainly get hold of more goods for the same money as a result of being willing to support economies like China where the workers operate on the basis of salaries and conditions that no Eu country would even begin to countenance. Plus there's more tat on the telly than anyone can shake a remote control at.

Football has become a circus; increasingly desperate entertainment has spawned the cult of the "beyond Z list" celebrity, and art is half a dead cow in formalin.

Taxation on enterprise and effort has increased everywhere; home sales tax is hugely increased, yet gambling winnings remain untaxed.

In the past 30 years, we seem to have created any number of non-productive jobs in various forms of big brotherliness and nannying. There has been a rise in the notion of "best practise" and all types of "standards". The tyranny of ISO9000 and its ilk has been used to replace common sense in many cases, and afforded work for legions of folks who would otherwise be unemployable in a productive economy.

The amazing thing is that the people of the UK seem ready to put up with this astonishing catalogue of failure - perhaps because they are too busy surviving to pause for long enough to think through their overall situation and that of their kids.

The homogenisation and "pasteurisation" of politics has meant that there are no more clear choices as the focus groups tell the politicians the same things, and so they have spent the past 10 years pinching each others suits of clothes.

But the one lesson that we have learned time and again throughout history (and forever ignore to our peril) is that ALL people are much more effective spending their own money than other people's money. This principle applies on almost any scale, so the one overriding theme of any policy should be to reduce direct taxation to allow people to be responsible for themselves and their own families across a much great range of topics.

The one thing that can set a country apart and head it in new directions is an inspirational leader. Margaret Thatcher was one, John Major was not, and in Blair many thought we had found a modernising leader ready to smooth off some of the harsher edges of the Thatcher years without introducing the sort of rampant socialism that Labour had always nurtured at is core with anthems like the Red Flag, and an unrepentant desire to nationalise.

But it has since transpired that Blair was no more than an accomplished actor with barely a notion of his own, directed by Alistair Campbell and his tartan mafia with their "remain in power at all costs" agenda, and the sinister Cherie Blair with her bizarre personal lifestyle and strange fixations around "human rights".

What a shambles. Can Gordon Brown do any better? He's been about as inspirational as one might expect a dour Scotsman without a personality might be. But the really scary thing is that there is absolutely no one, repeat no one, that looks even vaguely like a credible alternative in the Labour Party. They were and remain a very unimpressive array of largely talentless individuals who now have failed in almost every department. It is an entire government that is more obviously "unfit for purpose" as each day passes.

The Boy David is a nice enough bloke with a pleasant demeanour, but without experience as a product of the politics/spin industry, and that may catch up with him at some point. Alex Salmond is the most robust and best performer of all party leaders by a country mile, Alan Duncan is far and away the best prospect the Tories have - and who's to say that after springing the triumphant surprise of the first female PM, it might not also be their remit to provide the first (openly) gay one..?

Moreover, Alan Duncan would have the moral opportunity from which to re-reform many of the more absurd extremities of the mindless, ruthless and strident inclusivity after ten years of minority rule. Stranger things have happened.

The greater good - or BOGOF?

There are only two core functions in any economic cycle that are guaranteed to be necessary whatever else happens:- payment processing and goods handling.

Innovation and manufacturing are risks to be avoided at all costs, and because we are nation increasingly ruled by unimaginative accountants, "efficient" operations like Tesco have been able to exploit the IT revolution very effectively to get well on top of the logistics of the entire consumer business. Moreover, thanks to the granularity of modern demographic analysis, such warehouse operations are virtually risk-free sidelines for retail property developers.

News that Tesco continues to storm onwards by snapping up more than half of the retail space available last year was greeted by concern and joy in equal measure. Concern from those that recall a commercial monopoly is usually deemed to exist at around 20% of any given market, and delight from those who are claiming that is in fact Tesco that single-handedly controlled UK inflation by sitting on its suppliers' margins.

News that "certain retailers" extend their control of suppliers by forcing them accept retrospective price cuts and provide additional labour to stack shelves suggests that UK retailers are fast becoming little more than property developers with computerised CRM. They clearly have obtained more direct control of the market than is healthy in any competitive economy. No producer can afford not to be on the shelves of the retail cartel , and the cartel knows it.

As the Boy Campbell observed recently, the ability of major retailers to put the arm on their suppliers is a two edged sword, and if retailers continue to throw their weight around cartel-like when dealing with producers, something will have be done about it before the UK agriculture scene gives up and turns itself into yet more golf courses and theme parks.

The only good thing to be said for Tesco and its relentless consolidation of retail mediocrity is that it is now also doing to Johnny foreigner what it has done to its UK competition, with the sort of military precision not seen since the East India Company provided the commercial backup for the Victorian adventuring that turned the globe pink.

The Christmas festive season is now little more than a punctuation mark on the retail campaign calendar. And retailers' shelves are already creaking under the weight of Easter eggs.

Tesco's domination seems likely to continue unhindered, and although Sir Terry Leahy might not actually be as provocative as to declare "Am I bovvered?", increasing numbers of observers (including TMP) are starting to ponder the consequences of allowing the extermination of all other UK retailers.

Tesco is very effectively clearing the way for assimilation by the true Borg or global retailing - WalMart, whose quite holding position with Asda might yet turn out to be a Trojan Horse.

The Rural Post Office Scandal

High amongst the reasons for the government wanting to drop rural post offices is that Blair's regime has not shown any skill or appetite for dealing with either the rural community, small enterprises or self employed people with minds of their own.

Cherie Blair's gang of revolutionary republicans seems far more comfortable when engaging with large and easily "spun" centralised operations - with a lot to lose if they rub the government up the wrong way. Especially those operations with strategic management that has grown up in the age of spin, and who are happy to do just about anything for a gong and maintain what in more enlightend times would have been regarded as a monopoly that was not in the public interest.

A simplistic example being that a single call to the Sir Boss of a vast retail empire can result in a "deal" that affecting some 15% of the retail budget of the UK.

It's also much simpler for HMG to do a deal with Bill Gates than encourage the UK to develop innovative IT solutions based around the world of those unnervingly titled "open systems". And so MI6 can be guaranteed a back door into any Microsoft software product.

The political reality is that those affected are probably 80% non-Labour voters, and this government has shown that it can be quite sanguine about gerrymandering with the public interest and your money. By now HMG has realised that this government's involvement with anything even faintly commercial is the kiss of death, so it just wants out of the PO problem as fast as possible.

It might even pay handsomely to be rid of it if there is good PR to be had. I can imagine Tesco thinking about doing something with the opportunity - but I suspect that even they might wonder if this a bridge too far, and if there will be a backlash for the vast Tesco presence already out there.

One thing is for sure, Alistair Darling's PO plan has not been thought through commercially, and that there are opportunities for someone who can marshall these 2500 postmasters and postmistresses in a relevant structure.

The name of today's consumer marketing game is locating and engaging demographically identifiable punters as they become ever more dispersed across an increasingly distributed media landscape. So the opportunity to reach and serve defined communities like those being served here is only likely to get more valuable.

Consensus - too valuable for politicians

A word about us for a change.

TMP has no desire to create yet another political party, instead it seeks to provide a haven where despairing members of any party can come to discuss the sort of common sense and objective opinion that has been lost by the main parties in the mindless pursuit of swing voters.

There is clearly a varying degree of common ground between ALL parties, yet it is in the yah-boo-sucks nature of parliamentary politics that the majority consensus tends to get quickly overshadowed by the extremities of policy that might influence a few vacillatory swing voters.

Moreover, the dangers of consensus in the hands of dodgy politicians are obvious. Gordon Brown's latest raid on pockets in the name of the green consensus is a typically cynical effort to leverage the public conscience to fund his government's staggering profligacy and wastage.

The exploitation of careless "consensus" by party politicians had lead to the creation of monsters such as "health and safety" gestapo, and the rudderless NHS that we have today. And to listen to the twaddle spouted by job creation schemes such as "safety camera partnerships" you would think the UK was subject to the worst driving on earth - yet the stats clearly show the UK has amongst the safest, albeit most overcrowded, road systems on the planet.

Consensus works best when it is directly managed and controlled by its owners: the majority. But not all members of the majority are members of the ruling party, so how can we prevent politicians from leveraging consensus to fund extremism designed to attract the 10% of swing voters that actually decide UK elections?

More of the same

It hardly seems worth adding the chorus of irritation and indifference that has met the Chancellor's latest assault on the pockets of the nation. The same familiar platitudes, the same lame excuses (plus an inevitable new green one), the same old story. By now it's very predictable and very boring.

Bearing in mind that Gordon is hoping that he will have at least 3 years playing at being PM, he is obviously keen to rake in as much cash as possible to fund what will become his legacy. And as forewarned in this blog, he latched on to the careless "consensus" that has arisen around climate change as a handy excuse to pile on more of his trademark stealth taxes.

If only the relentless stream of hot air from this most dour and boring Scot could be channelled into a turbine at Westminster, his place on earth might not be the relentless waste of time and resources that it presently seems to be. As the opposition's star turn George Osborne wryly observed, Gordon has been "green" ever since the fateful night when he did his deal with Blair over who would get first turn at being PM. Pass the Chianti, someone...