Day 4993: DOCTOR WHO: Carry On – Don’t Lose Your Head

Saturday:

There are two problems with my writing a review of "Robot of Sherwood". Pressure of work is one, and the other is that beyond saying it was laugh-out-loud hilarious but that ending with the golden arrow is a total fail, what is there to say? And everyone else has said those things already.

Capaldi is a great comic actor, and here he's at his most Malcolm Tucker-alike, especially in the exchanges with Robin in the dungeon. Dressed in black, getting robbed by Robin Hood, he's very nearly the villain for the first act, particularly the "thwarted again" face Capaldi pulls when dunked in the stream. Which is great, but might be a danger. He's got such range, it might be better to let him find new ways of being funny, rather than writing for the Doctor as the acerbic spin doctor. Shades of writing for Bonnie Langford as "Bonnie Langford".

The message was a bit blunt force trauma as well: Clara spells it out before they've even left the TARDIS; Robin hammers the point home at the end. Yes, we get it, the Doctor is a hero, one of the iconic figures of British myth, to stand alongside Arthur, Gloriana and Sherlock. And of course, Robin.

Having spent a year deconstructing his own legend because it cast too long a shadow, though, his denial that Robin could be real just didn't ring true. He's not a stupid man; he would see the reflection. If the Doctor had been trying to tell Clara "you'll be disappointed; heroes never live up to the legend" it would have fit more with this newly self-doubting Doctor. His initial friction towards and mockery of Robin would have had a more solid foundation in his own psyche. And the journey towards liking the outlaw, seeing the man under the bluster, would have been more personal, of self-acceptance.

It was a good story for Clara. For once – finally – I could see the "control freak" tendencies. Though what happened to "my only pin up was Marcus Aurelius"? Squeeing over a Robin Hood is a lot closer to "young men performing sport" than "flirting with a mountain range". But the moments where she allows Tom Riley to uncover that Robin is more than just that guy whose laughing face you want to punch bring out the good teacher in her. And the scene between her and Ben Miller's delicious Sheriff of Nottingham, where she turns the tables and convinces him to tell her everything was excellent for the character. Very reminiscent of the Doctor doing something similar in the one really great scene from Gatiss's earlier "The Idiot's Lantern"; clearly Mark writes a good interrogation.

Though it's a shame the full reveal of the Sheriff's cyborg nature was dropped for entirely sensible reasons, as it would have added the twist that he lied to her too. Miller was a great villain as the Sheriff, just the right side of over-the-top ham. And I liked that he would undercut some of the more ludicrous clichés – "You'll live to regret that... actually, no you won't", or "that would be a ridiculous plan". Like Robert de Rainault of "Robin of Sherwood", or Blackadder (to Robin's Lord Flashheart) he brings the sensibilities of the modern viewer to the land of make believe. The (pardon the pun) cut slightly derailed a more interesting twist that he'd been literally rebuilt in the image of the legend. Though, again, the story could have done with a little tightening – if the robot knights had made themselves a Sheriff in response to a real Robin Hood, it could have tied up some of the story's contradictions.

Essentially, the story sets us up to expect this to be a fool. It's too good to be true, too true to the legend to be good.

And the scene where Robin goes into the moat with Clara – and is under for a long time – and then emerges carrying her Frankenstein fashion... That and the flip archery certainly look like they're trying to tell us he's a robot too.

So we keep expecting the other shoe to drop. And it doesn't . I suppose I should be praising that, given how absolutely by the numbers Gatiss ticks off the key Robin Hood plot points. But dramatically it feels off. If Robin were real but everything else faked by the robots reacting to him based on their faulty foreknowledge, that could work. But it's not. The Merrie Men are real, the splitting the arrow archery is for real (at least Robin's is). Yes, we get a bit of hand waving about the radiation leak making Sherwood CinemaScope green, but that's to explain something the Doctor's quibbled about rather than a cohesive story element.

The spaceship that disguises itself as a castle is very proto-TARDIS, a point that nothing is made of. And then there's that bit with the arrow. Was it scripted that the arrow should fly through that hole the robots had blasted earlier and strike the controls? (People who've read the leaked scripts will know.)

Obviously Gatiss has been going through those Robin Hood moments – the log over the river, the archery contest, the big fight with the Sheriff – but all nicely undercut and peppered with references to the Pertwee era, clearly a Gatiss favourite. Mention of miniscopes, and Capaldi's hilarious "Hai!" karate chop. But the biggest influence is season eleven opener "The Time Warrior", to the point I was expecting Dan Starkey to cameo as Field Marshal Swag on video link to the spaceship control room, demanding what they were doing with the Sontaran's robot knights. Which might be why the conclusion – shoot the arrow; castle explodes – deviates from the Hood myth (King Richard arrives to put all to rights. ish).

Or it's just as crushingly banal as the end of "The Shakespeare Code" (must use historical guest star's "superpower" to resolve plot. Somehow).

Only a brief nod to the arc this week. Or maybe two, if the Doctor's chalk and calculations are going somewhere. Obviously we've got more robots looking for "the Promised Land". Where, indeed, do all the calculators go? Which may or may not be Missy's heaven. It seems to be a real place though, which might count against the rather good theory I heard from The Pharos Project podcast: "heaven" is inside the Doctor's head, a place where he's remembering all the people he's killed. Making Missy his conscience. Which would be why she's a bit... broken. (Missy... My self... Nah!)

As for the Gallifreyan math... Obligatory Lawrence Miles reference: in "Interference" (book 2, I think) the eighth Doctor uses Gallifreyan written maths to create a fold in time. It has been argued that the twelfth Doctor might be doing the same, trying to engineer a backpack door into wherever Gallifrey is now, beyond the "crack". Presumably, Heaven.

None of which is to detract from the fact that this made me laugh. A lot. And on second viewing too. The sword v spoon fight is very Doctor Who. As is staging a genuine peasants' revolt and overthrowing the feudal tyrants. Nice nod to Troughton. The Sheriff is a hit. Clara is much more than a pretty dress. Robin is a true hero. Oh yes, and the Doctor is a hero too.

Next Time: the one with the scary poetry, the one with the thing in the corner of your eye, the one with something under the bed, the one with companion in the timey-wimey spacesuit... It's the most terrifying story... "Doctor Who and the Tropes of Moffat"! No, listen...

Day 3992: Tobin or Not Tobin: Why Paddy Ashdown is Wrong and We Need a Robin Hood Tax like an Arrow in the Head.

Tuesday:



Time to take a leaf out of Daddy Alex's book – and take my life in my fluffy feet – by picking a fight with Lord Paddy!



Look, for starters Robbing Hoodie ROBBED the taxman; he didn't work for him! A "Robin Hood Tax" is a CONTRADICTION IN TERMS!

People say "it's an itty bitty little fraction of a percent but it raises oodles of dosh." Well, it's either one or the other. If it raises a lot of money then that's got to come from SOMEWHERE.

And here's the real kicker: it comes from YOUR pensions and insurance. It doesn't come from "the rich" or from "the bankers". It comes from YOU.

The RICH do not, on the whole, spend their time buying and selling their assets over and over. They leave their wealth invested – in bonds or shares or in gold or oil paintings or racehorses or whatever. That's your problem right there: money being locked away in unproductive assets instead of being made to work creating business and jobs. A tax on capital transfers WON'T TOUCH THAT.

The capital transfer tax or Tobin Tax is usually said to apply to buying and selling shares and bonds, although some formulations suggest that it might be applied to ANY transfer of cash (yes, including moving your own money from your current account into your savings account).

The Tobin Tax mostly affects the HIGH VOLUME of stocks and shares traded on stock exchanges, particularly in LONDON.

But Bankers, you may somehow not have noticed this, do NOT play the city casinos with their own money. They invest money on behalf of clients, and mostly that is money from the huge funds controlled by pension funds, insurance firms and other financial institutions. And THAT money comes by and large from ordinary people paying in money to their pension plan or insuring their health, home, holiday or the rest.

If you're going to take fifty billion quid in extra tax then THAT's where it's going to come out of. Pensions and insurance firms will make less profit on each transaction. It doesn't matter that it's only a little bit less per transaction; if it's going to add up to a LOT of tax raised then it's going to be a LOT less profit overall. So they will need YOU to pay that extra bit in to cover it.

We've been here before.

When Mr Frown raided the pension funds back in the days when he was Mr Pay Down the National Debt (following Fatty Clarke's plan for repaying the tripling of the national debt the Conservatories ran up under Mr Major Minor, oh those heady days), what he did was to abolish a little tax giveaway called the Advance Corporation Tax Credit or ACT.

What ACT meant was that when company dividends were paid, 20% of the dividend was sent to the treasury. Ordinary shareholders would pay tax on their dividend, but the ACT was like a payment on account, so some or all of the tax they owed was already paid. But Pension funds didn't have to pay tax, so they could reclaim ALL of the ACT credit. It was only a little thing, an itty bitty amount per dividend. But it added up to a BIG amount in total.

And through the effect of compound interest, that amount could be snowballed to really build up the value of the pension fund.

So when Mr Frown took the ACT away, that REALLY hit the long-term growth value of the funds in which pensions were invested. And that's a big factor in the way that pensions suddenly became HUGELY more expensive to fund. People with private pensions had to pay in a lot more. Many companies decided that they had to stop offering final salary pensions because they were just too expensive.

(Ironically, Mr Frown STOPPED using the pension money to pay down Britain's debts and instead started using it to pay lots more public sector workers. Which is another reason why some people are a LITTLE bit resentful about those public sector workers who are demanding EVEN more from tax payers to fund all the extra pensions that all the extra workers are going to need. It would be easier to believe "we want decent pensions for everyone" if Mr Frown had not explicitly funded public sector pensions – and salaries – by raiding the private sector pensions for the money!)

The government and the Liberal Democrats in particular say that people who are paying into pensions are doing the RIGHT THING.

Now we could have a great big debate about whether they are or they aren't – pensions are of course more tying up wealth in unproductive savings rather than spending or investing money in a business – but since we have made a retirement, and a COMFORTABLE retirement at that, not merely an ASPIRATION but an EXPECTATION for most people then someone has got to pay for that.

Until the Seventies, that someone was always the government, but since the Eighties successive governments have made it abundantly clear that they are not going to pick up the tab and people had better make their own arrangements.

So it's a bit bloody cheeky to then keep eyeing up the savings of those people and going "we'll have a chunk of that, thanks".



(And the same thing goes for the so-called Higher Rate Pension Credits too. As I Twittered last week: that's not £40bn GIVEN to private pensions; that's £40bn NOT TAKEN from them. There IS a difference. Payments into your pension pot are supposed to come from your PRE-TAX income, because you are deferring that income until later in your life and you are going to get TAXED on it when the pension pays out. So it's somewhat NAUGHTY to tax it going IN as well.)



Anyway, the WORST thing about Captain Paddy's article is that he doesn't just want to raise yet more tax, but that he already has a wishlist of things to SPEND it all on.

Yes, of course it would be wonderful to end child poverty, or to reverse climate change, or to meet our Millennium commitments. But we are ALREADY spending more than we raise in tax. And we are already taking more than half Great Britain's GDP. Somewhere between none of it and all of it there has to be a limit to how much of what the country produces the government can take in tax. Adding a new tax burden and then hypothecating it to causes, no matter how laudable and worthy, just makes it more difficult to close the gap between what we are getting in and what we are forking out.

And, at the last election, the country made the choice to go for LESS tax and LESS spend.

That's the truth about the "ideological" cuts, incidentally. The country chose to accept the need for cuts. Just as in 1997 when the county accepted the case for more spending on public services, and so the largest vote went to the party "ideologically" inclined to SPEND, so OF COURSE in 2010, knowing that there had to be cuts, the largest vote went to the Party "ideologically" inclined to implement them. As opposed to the one which promised fiscal prudence and then spent like there was no tomorrow. Which in the end, there wasn't! And then promised us fiscal prudence again. And also promised us "Cuts deeper than Thatcher's". And now deny everything.



But never mind that Paddy is having a fit of the TAX-and-SPENDS; all this austerity is bound to give even the best of us a funny turn. But I want to say why this tax is WRONG no matter WHAT you spend it on.

You see, Paddy suggests that the Robbing Hoodie Tax will have a "calming" effect on the markets, as though it will act as an automatic regulator.

The logic behind this is that people will make choices about whether or not to do transactions if there's going to be a cost involved, so there will be fewer "unnecessary" transactions. The assumption here is that FEWER transactions is necessarily BETTER.

That's because people think that more trading means that the market is more out of control.

And there have been a good few occasions now where we have seen huge drops in the stock prices allegedly driven by computers chuntering away at huge volumes of trades and getting themselves stuck into automatic selling spirals.

But a free market isn't SUPPOSED to be "under control". And those incidents stand out because they are the EXCEPTIONS; they are NOT the way the markets behave day in day out almost all year round.

There're plenty of things wrong with Free Market Theory – like the assumption that investors will always behave RATIONALLY (have you SEEN the stock market?!) or that everyone has the same access to INFORMATION (have you HEARD of insider dealing?!) – but there being TOO MUCH trade is NOT one of them.

More transactions OUGHT to be MORE stable.

This is the most basic of those things called "market forces". A famous man called Mr Adam Smith wrote a book about it called "The Wealth of Terry Nations" (clue: invent the Daleks). Mr Adam Smith called this "the invisible hand" of the market, which "guides" people to find the right price.

If you happen to be a left-wing critic of liberal economics, you might talk about "the invisible hand" as some kind of crazy right-wing belief in MAGIC or WOO.

In which case, you need punching in the head, because it's NOT belief in magic; it's A GREAT BIG FLUFFING METAPHOR.

There isn't a REAL "invisible hand"; there isn't a magic pixie who "knows" what the proper price should be and "guides" the market to it. It just means that the market reaches a consensus without everyone having to sit down and agree on what it will be.

The theory of market forces isn't a made up belief like crossing your fingers for luck, or praying to Mercury for a safe journey, or the dialectic imperative of history. It's based on the way people really behave (or at least the way they behave a lot of the time).

It's like a weight on a spring. Let the weight go and it will bounce up and down as gravity tries to pull the weight down and the spring tries to pull the weight back up. At some point the weight will settle down and stop. No one has "decided" the height it stops at; it's just the point where the downward force and the upward force BALANCE.

So, somewhere there is a fair price; no one knows what it is. BUT if some people are charging more and some people are charging less then buyers will go to the people who are charging less. The people who are charging more won't sell until they drop their prices. Prices will fall. BUT (again!) if there are limited supplies, the people who are selling might chose NOT to sell if the price is too low, so the people who are buying won't be able to buy until they raise the price. Prices will rise. Between them, these two forces will reach a BALANCE point and that is the "market price".

The ACTUAL price you might pay at any one moment will wobble up and down around this level as the market is constantly adjusting and readjusting. INDIVIDUALLY people don't "know" the market price but they can see from the trading around them what SORT of price it should be and can either squeeze a good deal out of a seller or pay over the odds if they're in a hurry to buy and so strike their own deals accordingly at ABOUT the market price.

Now if there's a REAL change to the supply in the REAL World – like frost destroying the broccoli crop or a new oil strike – then the balance of the forces CHANGES and the price goes up or down.

(That's true of demand as well – e.g. it is thought that when the Roman Empire was turned CHRISTIAN by the Emperor Constantine all the temples had to stop making sacrifices to all the other gods so there was a big fall in demand for INCENSE, and as a result the price of Frankincense collapsed, wiping out the economy of Yemen. Which, frankly, has never recovered!)

The bigger the market, the more trades there are, the better this works.

Think about it: if there's just you and a farmer, then she can offer you a price and you can only take it or leave it. But if you are at the farmers' market, then she can offer you one price and you can either take it OR go and see what several other farmers are offering for their goods. So she's less likely to quote you over the odds. And the more farmers there are at the market, then the more the market forces will work to balance out the price.

This, incidentally, is another reason why MORE TRADE is ALWAYS BETTER.

A Tobin Tax would have a CHILLING effect on the financial markets, maybe not much of a one, but a little bit and that would make them LESS efficient.

A proper REGULATOR, like the controller of a steam engine, depends on a NEGATIVE FEEDBACK mechanism. That's CYBERNETICS. If the machine goes too fast, the controller starts to slow it down; but – and this is what the Tobin Tax doesn't do – if it slows too much the controller ought to speed it back up again. Tax just takes money out; it doesn't put anything back if the market grinds to a halt.

At the moment we want MORE transactions, specifically in the form of more BANK LENDING. So, sorry Captain Paddy, but a tax that is specifically designed to make FEWER transactions is EXACTLY the WRONG prescription.
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