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Julia Gasper's
Oxford Column
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For an Oxford insider's opinion on
events and developments in Oxford, Oxfordshire and elsewhere in the
world
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Julia Gasper 2 October 2008
 Nobody knows how bad this recession will get. If you have just lost your job or
your savings, I’m not going to aggravate your pain by telling you that it’s
jolly good to have huge leaps in heating bills and travel costs, because they
are one way of making all of us reduce our energy consumption and carbon
emissions. Dying would be an even better way, wouldn’t it?
But there are some things we can do to fight back against rising prices. I am
surprised that more people don’t take advantage of the Open Market in the centre
of Oxford on Wednesdays. OK, so a lot of people are working then. But what about
all the people who are walking about the town on Wednesdays – they’re obviously
not working – and what about all the people who are actually at home? What about
people having their lunch hour or people who work flexi-time? It may be that
Oxford’s Open Market does not have quite the range of goods or the raffish charm
of some open markets in Spain or Morocco, but one thing it certainly has got is
bargains. If you don’t go there regularly, you will find it hard to believe.
Saving 50% or more on the supermarket prices.
Buying your food and other necessities at the
Oxford Open Market
you can save 50% or more on the supermarket prices. Surely, in a time when
people are feeling the pinch, that is worth making the effort to go, even if you
can only get there once a month? If you live out in Risinghurst or Blackbird
Leas, and can get in to the Open Market by bus with a wheeled shopper once in a
way, it really is worth the time and the fares. You can save really substantial
amounts of money in half an hour and go home laughing. I was at the Open Market
yesterday, and huge, clean, baking potatoes were being sold four for £1.
Beautiful tomatoes on the vine were two pounds for £1.50 - half the typical
supermarket price, and just as good as the tomatoes being sold at the covered
market. Large cauliflowers, white, fresh and inviting, were 99p. Big, sweet,
perfect plums were £1 per bag. How do they do it? Five huge nectarines were
£1.50. Fresh spinach – mmm, what a treat – was £1 for TWO bunches. Large, firm,
shiny pimentos, red, yellow or green, were three for £1. Huge aubergines were
two for £1.50. Five small avocado pears were £1, and were sold nice and hard so
that you could get them home without them being reduced to pulp in the bag.
Compare that to paying 90p or more for each medium-sized one in the covered
market or your local supermarket. The smallest ones have the best flavour
anyway.
A few yards away, you will find stalls selling famous brand tea and coffee,
£1.20 for a pack of 100 tea-bags or 227grams of ground coffee. Jars of instant
coffee or cocoa are the same price. The cheese stall has a wonderful selection
of really exciting cheeses. I got a Camembert and a good slice of Stilton, each
for £1. Parmesan cheese is £5.50 per pound, less than half the shop price. If
you are more interested in getting the largest possible hunk of strong Cheddar
as cheaply as possible, you can get that too. Joints or rashers of bacon, smoked
or unsmoked, are about half the shop price. Three packets of digestives, or
butter shortbread, or chip cookies for £1 – but you do have to avoid a rather
dangerous array of classy Belgian chocolates at ridiculous prices if you go
anywhere near the cake and biscuit stalls. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Equally good bargains are available on household goods.
Large famous brand toothpaste for 89p. A pack
of four scented loo-rolls for £1. Yes, scented! So you can be poor, but proud.
Three pairs of rubber gloves for £1, which is the price of one pair in a
supermarket, or two in a bargain shop. Large jars of Vitamin E cream for £1, and
two bars of Dove beauty-bar for the same money. Loads of shampoos, conditioners,
scented bath-oils, shaving products, baby products, make-up and body lotions.
The profit margin on cosmetics is one of the highest and most indecent of all
consumer goods. Most of these things are half water and the other half mainly
lanolin or glycerine. So why not get all your cosmetics for a year in the
market? Unlike tomatoes, they do keep.
If you can still find room in your backpack or wheeled trolley, there are
leather purses priced from £1.99 to £3.99, rolls of black disposal bags for £1,
sets of famous brand batteries for £1, new plastic-wrapped CDs for £1 - £3,
cotton nightdresses and bath-robes at under ten pounds, and don’t forget the
underwear. When the heating goes down, your underwear comes into its own! Don’t
shiver in flimsy or worn out knickers, holey socks or shrunken vests, when you
can replace them all with lovely cosy stuff from the Open Market at the price of
a cup of coffee in most parts of this town. Warm tights can cost up to £10 in
some places but they’re £1.50 in the Open Market.
And there’s one other attraction of the Open Market – it’s amazing who you see
there. I bumped into two old friends in ten minutes, and you might often spot
Michel Sadones or one of our other famous chefs lurking around the produce
stalls. Why do 5-star chefs go to open markets? Because they know that the food
is fresher and more likely to be local than most of what you can get in the
shops.
Enjoy the recession!
Julia Gasper 2nd
September 2008
Oh dear! There
never was such a poisoned chalice as the one Tony Blair passed over to Gordon
Brown. Ever since he took over as PM, one plague after another has hit the UK.
Gordon Brown made a huge mistake when he abolished the 10p tax band. He showed
an unawareness of the point of view of the lower-paid voter, of which no Labour
leader should be guilty. His cabinet members must have been fast asleep, if they
did not warn him.
Still, it is
sad to see the British public stooping to the level of spoiling a Prime
Minister’s holiday. What could Gordon Brown do now to restore his lost
popularity?
He is not
responsible for every single thing that has gone wrong in the last twelve
months. Let’s admit it, he can hardly be blamed for the rise in international
oil prices or the doubling of world population in the past twenty-five years,
both of which are now having an inevitable impact on the life we lead and the
prices we have to pay for things. He may have no idea how to cope with it, but
nor do most of those people who talk about him as a complete flop. He was not
responsible for us going into Iraq, and he understands only too clearly how
horribly stuck we now are in there, like a bear with its paw trapped in a
hornets’ nest. He is not responsible for a slowdown of the housing market, which
is anyway no bad thing for many people (though you’d never think so judging from
the doom and gloom press reports).
I would
suggest some measures he could take right now to regain popular support:
1)
Abandon plans for expanding Heathrow airport. The plans are an
environmental disaster, and they make nonsense of all the government’s professed
concern about the environment. It is no good pretending that air travel does not
damage the environment. If carbon emissions have to be reduced, then it is
contradictory to encourage the growth of air travel over the next generation,
and thereafter indefinitely. We have only just opened one new terminal at
Heathrow, dedicated to transatlantic flights, which are the worst when it comes
to damaging the environment! Of course, the construction industry and the
aviation industry will put arguments that we have to do this – they would argue
for a fifteenth terminal at Heathrow, but a government needs a consistent
policy, and this one hasn’t. It’s green when it needs an excuse for more taxes,
and then smiles at the expansion of what is already the biggest airport in
Europe, and one of the biggest in the world.
2)
If he is worried about how old people, in particular, are going to keep
warm, Gordon Brown should revise and modify the regulations about new gas
boilers and heating systems. Millions of people in this country live in houses
with aging central heating systems, twenty or more years old. Legislation
brought in since then, with the aim of reducing carbon emissions, places such
restrictions and make such extreme demands that an increasing number of people
are going to find that it’s not just the price of fuel that is the problem –
they won’t be able to replace their central heating systems at all. The price
and the technical awkwardness of installation will just be prohibitive.
Meanwhile in most areas, solid fuel has also been banned. So what is left? We
will go back to being a nation of people stooping over little paraffin stoves to
keep warm, or sleeping in our overcoats. The legislation must be revised, now.
If this means we clash with the EU, to hell with Brussels. Keeping people warm
in their homes has to be a higher priority than expanding business and
commercial aviation. If something has to go, it should be the latter.
3)
Require local authorities to restore weekly rubbish collections. I don’t
know how they can do this. Financially they are strapped and there are now all
sorts of regulations about reducing landfill. It is quite right that we should
reduce landfill, and we all need to reduce the amount of packaging we use and
dispose of. But if Gordon could just find some way of restoring weekly
bin-collections, he would find it one of the biggest vote-pullers he could hope
for. Fining people for throwing away Easter-egg boxes while at the same time
allowing the expansion of Heathrow airport does not sound like a consistent
environmental policy to me. How about making a stint of public bin-collection
the penalty for people who bore us to death on TV like Jade Goodie?
4)
He should respond to the overwhelming preference of most of the public
for a health system in which they have their own, personal GP. Don’t let that
one feature of the system become obsolete! The old NHS created by the Labour
party is gone, maybe forever, and what has been put in its place is messed
around so frequently that most people can’t keep up with what is going on. How
much more disenchanted and alienated can its workers get? Everybody from doctors
downwards is critical of the state of the weird, over-complicated mess we seem
to have created, and has grievances about the way the Trusts operate. Gordon
Brown and his health secretaries should at least be seen to listen to the
opinion of the voters, which is plainly on the side of retaining one-to-one
relationships between patients of all ages and their GP.
5)
If Gordon is worried about the state of the housing market, he needs to
reform Stamp Duty Land Tax. Personally, I think that a fall in house prices
benefits a lot of prospective buyers and the press is far too fond of making a
crisis out of everything. But supposing that it is a bad thing, and you are one
of those people trying to sell their house in a somewhat slowed-down market,
what should Gordie do? To abolish SDLT would be grossly unfair to those people
who have recently paid it, and to allow new buyers more time to pay would be a
petty measure. It’s the way that SDLT is structured that needs to be reformed.
At the moment, it is 1% on residential properties up to £250,000. Then it
suddenly jumps to 3%, which means that if you buy a house for £251,000 you have
to pay £7,530 tax! This tax band was introduced when the average price of a home
was about £40,000. It was meant as a form of super-tax, on the very rich. Since
then, inflation has changed the whole picture. Now, in areas such as Oxford,
£251,000 is the price of an average three-bedroom semi, and you can get nothing
below that price in London. That means that when you tot up all the costs of
moving, the average buyer has to find about ten thousand pounds over and
above the purchase price, and any deposit, before going ahead with the deal. For
the mortgage-paying family on a tight budget, that is a major consideration. No
wonder the market has slowed down. Gordie and Darling should raise the threshold
in line with inflation, and introduce a series of smaller steps, so that people
buying a house for £250,000 -£299,000 have to pay only 1%. By raising the rate
by 0.5% with each £50,000 increase in price above that, the rate of 3% would be
reached when a house costs £500,000. Since so many houses are selling for far
more than this nowadays, the government could not complain about loss of
revenue. Anyway they get no revenue from SDLT if houses are not selling.
6)
HIPS – home information packs. If you get one prepared by a solicitor,
which is the recommended approach, these can cost more than £400. Some are
advertised at under two hundred pounds, but it is still £200 that most vendors
can ill afford, and they pass the cost straight on to the buyer. As the final
insult, they are subject to VAT! The logic behind Home Information Packs is
wrong, as it is the buyer’s responsibility to investigate what they are buying,
and a surveyor paid by the purchaser is the most reliable, objective judge of
what you are getting. Abolishing HIPS would speed up the house market and
restore some goodwill to the present government. If you can’t abolish HIPS, for
Heaven’s sake, at least abolish the VAT on it.
Is there any
hope for Gordon Brown winning the next election? Although I won’t be voting for
him, I think he is not a hopelessly lost cause. He has a lot of appeal,
personally. He is cuddly, hunky and dresses like a real man i.e. you never
notice what he is wearing. His speaking voice is deep and reassuringly Scottish.
And if he carried out my suggestions, I think he could still step back from the
brink.
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