Five and a bit years ago one of my best friends died. Nobody really knew how old he was, but the consensus was that he was about fifty. His name was Budge, and he knew more than the rest of us put together. He lived pretty hard, and in the end his heart gave out, which was difficult for the rest of us to understand, because that heart was so big and strong.

I think of Budge all the time, certainly every day or two. For the first time ever last week, I was glad he wasn’t here. Extreme, but I know that if he could see what was happening to his team, West Ham United, he would be in a lot of pain, and nobody wants that for their friends.

Have you read anything about the actual facts of the lease that David Sullivan and David Gold are in the process of signing for the Olympic Stadium? It is being presented in the press as a stadium move, maybe a bit like the one Manchester City did, or Arsenal. It is suggested that this is a brave new future for West Ham and their supporters. The papers describe what is happening in terms of a football club that needs more revenue taking advantage of the ticket sales opportunity at a major asset with an unclear future, the Olympic stadium. The only piece of the puzzle that is being presented as controversial is where the funding for the conversion to a football stadium is coming from. £429m of our money has already been spent on building the stadium. Now another £200m is needed to turn it into a ground. Of that money, £15m will come from West Ham. This, it is suggested, is a big win for the club.

But the question of funding is not the point. Certainly it is very difficult to believe that the move is in the interests of anyone but the current owners of West Ham, who will see a short term spike in the value of their asset, which they will presumably look to liquidate. Their investment to date is £35m in the form of a loan. The value of the club will include an asset that can be capitalised – the lease – which will pay them out several times over.

But that is just money. Nobody is talking about the devastation that will be laid waste on the supporters of West Ham United. Putting aside the heartbreak involved with leaving Upton Park, and all of incredible history that lives there, the ghosts of Billy Bonds, Bobby Moore, Frank Lampard, Geoff Hurst, Trevor Brooking and Tony Cottee, the jellied eels and England 66. Putting all of that to one side, and embracing the idea that the club is being set on a course of being the cheapest and only way of easily seeing a Premiership match in London, in a ground being designed around executive boxes and prawn sandwiches, that is still only part of the issue.

No. The big issue is that Gold and Sullivan are about to take West Ham somewhere football has never been. West Ham are not getting a ground. If the lease gets signed, and it looks like it will, West Ham will not have a home any more.

West Ham are going to sign a 99 year lease to play 25 games a year at the Olympic Stadium. 25 days. For 25 days a year, the Olympic Stadium will be West Ham’s home. For 340 days a year, it will not be. For football supporters that have never been affected by ground sharing, that is quite hard to imagine. There will be no West Ham signs on days other than match days. There will be no hammers over the doors. There will be no Bobby Moore statue. It will be the football equivalent of going to a (nice) hotel and wondering why it doesn’t feel like home.

But it isn’t a hotel, it’s a ground. It is supposed to be a home ground. Not having a home ground rips the heart out of supporters; just ask Charlton, or Brighton, or Wimbledon. Charlton knew where they were going, although it took years and years to get back to the Valley. Brighton flickered with going out of business completely before they got rescued. Wimbledon were in disastrous shape financially even before they got knifed by the football league.

Even the financially strong clubs can struggle with losing their home. Arsenal famously have yet to win a single thing since moving six years ago. The only example of a club making it work is Man City (also the only team who’s name sounds like a gay bar) and that is mostly because they have amongst the most loyal fans in the whole country, and a lot of them. Long before they had a billionaire owner, the fans always came, 40,000+ every week. In 1997 they went down, and their average attendance barely dropped a percentage point.

West Ham don’t have that. Their attendances pitch up and down. Now West Ham are taking a bet that they can fill a 60,000 seater stadium. An extra 30,000 seats. You don’t do that by handing out some cheap tickets at the local school. The only way I can see that happening is by flogging the corporate hospitality and football tourist tickets as hard as possible. As long as Chelsea, Arsenal and Spurs are solidly sold out, then there will be scope to sell tickets at West Ham – to see the away team.

The best outcome then, is a soulless corporate stadium, where they put some flags up on match day, and a load of people turn up to see the other team. If West Ham get relegated, even that model falls apart. I’m glad Budge didn’t have to see such an ugly end for such a legendary club.

The headline in the paper is that Jeremy Hunt, a government Minister, is going to bring a social scandal to an end. That must be a good thing, one would think. Maybe he is going to reconsider whether people suffering with cancer should have their benefit stopped if they don’t hurry up and get a job. Maybe he has decided that we don’t need to repossess the mobility scooters that disabled people use to get about. Maybe he thinks that Cameron’s bedroom tax and the resultant eviction of thousands of families is actually a scandal and not acceptable policy after all. 

No. It’s none of those things. The scandal being discussed is that there are middle class people in this country of ours that are in danger of inheriting less than they had originally thought. A sickening situation has arisen that we should all be alarmed about – there are people walking around the UK that are not going to be able to trade up to a bigger house when their ancestors die. I feel bad. I’m sure you do too. The idea that these people will have to pay their own way is sad. What bad luck.

But it’s not a scandal, is it? By what definition is that a social scandal? Jeremy Hunt has announced that he is going to spend £1bn to protect these poor souls and their inheritances. Is this money going to help care for the elderly? No. The story is being spun that in some way this government are creating a care programme, but not one penny is going towards the care crisis we are currently living through.

Is this about trying to win a by election, or maybe shore up the Tory vote ready for all the local government elections this year? Well, no. It is such a brilliant policy that not only does all of the care professions, and every right minded person in the country, despise it, so do all of the old school Tory voters too. The device being brought to bear to protect all this inheritance money is to freeze the Inheritance Tax (IHT) threshold. The same ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ that was on the letters page of the Torygraph last week calling for benefit cuts for the destitute are now even MORE appalled that the threshold for paying inheritance tax has not been put up to a million pounds, or more. Gideon has backed down on that, and the party faithful are calling for a lynching.

But this is where the spin and the madness really take hold. The estate of a couple that pass away in 2013 will pay inheritance tax only if the value of the estate is more than £650,000. That means that this Social Scandal Jeremy Hunt is solving, is being solved for the benefit of 2.8% of the population. Even then, those people generally engage in some vaguely legal but ethically reprehensible trust and escape paying any IHT anyway. I am proud to say that my Granny knew that tax is the price we pay for civilization, and we should look at serial tax avoiders as we do at the lowest of the low. Then again, we live in a society that watches carefully as a whole industry, the bankers, glory in laundering money for drugs cartels, defrauding old people, small businesses, investors and shareholders, rig markets, sugarcoat dud loans to look like good ones, load the world economy wit ever greater levels of risk, and throw millions of people out of work, all in the interest of enriching themselves, and we do nothing at all about it(another story for another time). Maybe in a context like that tax avoidance is ‘acceptable’.

But back to IHT. This inevitably made it onto the front page of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph: It really is appaling, etc. “Thousands more middle class families will be dragged into paying 40% inheritance tax”. Utter nonsense. In fact, not nonsense, but a lie. By what definition could the top 2.8% of the wealthy in the UK possibly be ‘the middle class’? This is an ancient right wing trick, spreading moral panic, when there is nothing to worry about or care about. If the top 2.8% richest families in the UK are the middle class, then there is an extraordinarily large working class, and the whole definition of the word ‘middle’ will have to be reviewed and the OED updated.

If you are paying 40% tax on your income each month, which means you earn more than £35,000 per year, then you are in the top 13% of wage earners in the UK. The average house in the UK costs £250,000. If you own one, good. If you still own it when you die, great. You have a nest egg to leave to someone you love. The idea that should mean that you care about inheritance tax is absurd. Even if you owned three such houses, you would be facing a bill of less than £40,000. If you knew someone that owned three houses, would you think of them as reasonably well off? Come on.

The misdirection and outright lies that Jeremy Hunt is bandying about at the moment take advantage of an age old fact – people never understand how the distribution of wealth works, and they always believe that they are further up the food chain than they actually are. That allows American-style economic planning where wages keep falling, and wealth is siphoned upwards.  That is bad for our country, and a disaster for our economy.

But what of the moving parts of Jeremy Hunt’s care plan? “These historic reforms will give everyone the protection they want in their old age and save the family home”. Meaningless garbage. A real cap on costs would have helped. The cap of £75,000 that has been announced won’t touch the vast majority of people. Sad to say, but people don’t live more than two years once they are in a care home. The £75,000 is care costs only, not bed and board. The number of people that will hit the cap will be tiny. When I was looking a few years ago, the typical cost was £800 a week. The most a local council will pay is £480, and that is for someone with no savings and no home. Everyone else pays, on a tapered scheme. This ‘historic reform’ is doing nothing for anyone but the newspapers.

Anyone, apart from those people hoping to inherit and sad about inheritance tax of course. Even then, there is no way of said policy to protect the houses themselves being discussed – the bricks and mortar, full of memories. Maybe that has some importance, maybe not. It is not the subject of Hunt’s policy. What is the £1bn for? To protect some of the value of some rich people’s inheritances. Has it fixed the care problem we are in? No. In a country where people are queueing at food banks, where jobs are evaporating, where homeless shelters are sold out every night, and where we are closing down the NHS, so we really think that insulating people from IHT is the right way to spend the budget we do have?

But, goal line technology sucks ass. It is the most redundant, techie waste of time, and is destined to make something worse not better. The history of technology is littered with things that should be uninvented: Bing, Sinclair C5, 3D movies, no-touch taps, the Segway, the list is long. The recurring feature of all these is that they are mostly harmless, beyond the waste of resources and presumably opportunity cost that goes with each of them (and the fact I can’t wash my hands in a public restroom). Surely nobody really cares if you think it is cute to go on a Segway tour of Barcelona, but £5,000 for a very inferior bicycle is not moving the human race forwards. Probably everyone understands if you have come to loathe Google, but it is unlikely that your emotional solution is going to be to use an inferior product from Microsoft, and so on.

The same is not true of goalline technology in football. Do you know why everyone likes football? Because you need two jumpers and a tincan to play it. If it is a hugely competitive event, you need four jumpers. That’s it. That simplicity, that beauty, that extraordinary availability is why running, fighting, throwing and football are the ways the whole world determines competition once it has learnt to walk. The difference? In running, fighting, and throwing, the hierarchy doesn’t change much, and you are doing it on your own. Very popular if you are best at it, loses its charm quickly if you are not. Football is different to that. You play with your friends, you get a chance to be creative, and you can be short and fat and still great (Mickey Quinn, Sammy Lee, Thomas Brolin).

Yes, geeky people all around the world love to wear their Disney ties, eat pizza, imagine Princess Leia as Jabba’s slave, and talk about solutions that could determine through the use of technology whether a ball has crossed the line. Let’s bury cables that carry an electric current in the penalty box to create a magnetic grid. Let’s use solid balls that have an RFID chip at their very centre. Let’s have a radio signal sent to the referee’s watch when the ball enters the goal. Let’s put high speed cameras in the goalposts. Let’s use triangulation and logic. Pass me my R2D2 mug, Eric, I’ve had a brilliant idea that can solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

What utter bollocks. What an excruciating, embarrassing waste of time. What a brilliant way to destroy something so beautifully simple. Is there a problem with goals that are not given? Yes. Does this have an ever increasing impact now that football is more a corporate investment vehicle than a game children like playing at school? Yes. Does the problem need a solution? Yes. And the solution is for the fourth official to look at a TV set and tell the ref if it is a goal or not.

Remember the anger when Lampard’s shot bounced over the line in the World Cup? Do you remember how long it took to feel that, and know for absolute certain that it was a goal? I would guess, less than two seconds, and that was sitting at home watching a commercial broadcast from thousands of miles away. Currently the fourth official is standing by the side of the pitch, waiting to hold up a board saying how many minutes Alex Ferguson has asked to be added on to play. How long would it take for him to turn round, look at a monitor, and say into the microphone that he already wears, ‘that was a goal’. Three seconds? Five? What extra technology does that need? An extra monitor? Probably not, they are probably already in the dugout area at most ground that would end up with goal line technology. Anything else? No. Do you think Sky Sports would be happy to position cameras in exactly the right place to answer this question? They do already.

Come on. I’m not shorting the stock of Hawkeye, Ltd. I just think this idea is absurd, expensive, and divisive. Don’t open the door for centre halves asking for a video replay to prove that an attacker dived in the box, or strikers insisting that the fourth man show their shirt was being held when they jumped for a corner. Use the cameras already in place to support the ref, and keep technology off the pitch, forever. Low tech is great tech.

Now its back! We all hate Barclays. This time it feels harsher. It might be more lasting. Certainly we can feel it. Instead of taking offence at a vicious regime being supported across the sea, now the blow from Barclays feel more personal. We can feel the bow wave of Barclays traders market manipulation in our mortage rates, in our business loans, in our savings account. It hurts, and we lash out in pain. Those bankers, they’re the problem.

If we are honest with ourselves for a moment, it is surely odd that we are surprised at the behavior of investment bankers. From what we all feel that we know about that profession, why would we start from a position that the big players in big markets would probably operate in a clean hands, totally ethical way? Why would the default way of working be squeaky clean? Really?

Two weeks after fines totaling $450m were levied on Barclays, and a week after their CEO Bob Diamond resigned, everyone in the country’s understanding of what LIBOR is has increased by over 1000%. We have watched agog the dazzling meltdown of the Barclays board as it has been played out in front of us. The exciting first act of the fine, then the Chairman Marcus Agius handing in his cards in an attempt to be a human shield for Bob, then the Stalin show trial resignation, and then the high comedy attempt by our MPs to crack the hard exterior of Diamond Bob, failing even more pitifully than they did with Digger.

One can imagine how this felt inside the bank. Clearly days went by where the board had still not grasped how serious the situation for Barclays as a brand was, while outside the bank everyone was talking about Barclays position as being irrecoverable. The dishonesty at the heart of the bank’s operations had been dragged out for all to see, and Barclays was now Enron.

Bobtism shone through regardless. Bob Diamond is certainly a force of nature. “We all know that these events are not representative of our culture, and it is my responsibility to get to the bottom of that and resolve it” he wrote, in an impassioned letter to Barclays staff. But it was too late, and external pressure forced Bob and COO Jerry del Missier out within 24 hours. Bobtism was not enough.

Bob said he was ‘physically sick’ when he read the email trail that exposed the Barclays trading desk, which is all well and good. We don’t even have to have a view on the culpability and accountability of that activity, when we can see undeniable evidence of manipulation elsewhere. Barclays reported borrowing costs dropped dramatically and permanently following a question from the Bank of England as to why they appeared high. High? No! After that question was asked, what had been a standard process of calculating interest rates across a number of lending vehicles deteriorated into being a highly illegal game of bluff between Barclays and the BBA, the body responsible for calculating the LIBOR rate.

Diamond’s defence of this, for there could be no suggestion that he was not fully aware, was that he wanted to Barclays to appear to be ‘in the pack’, rather than an outsider paying a higher interest rate than anyone else. That would suggest that his bank was less creditworthy than their competitors, and that could not be tolerated. At this point Bob’s Bank decided their submitted LIBOR rate would be decided on a PR rather than a fact basis. That is a very gory way of cheating the system, and for that crime Bob lost his job.

In the next few months, more banks will be found guilty of similar crimes, and in the next year or two there will be another round of revelations, unraveling and soul searching as the banks throw their hands up in the air and say ‘we have done wrong, flog us, we have learnt and this will never happen again’,

A few years ago, it was about selling shares in giant subprime investments that were riding on zero foundations. This month it is about creating a situation where a bank can affect its own profitability by changing a number in a spreadsheet that is accepte don trust. Next it will be something else, and that will be followed by ’Whoops! Got caught. Let’s go and find another way of making money’. That’s not an optional process, that is the core function of the industry. Annoyingly, investment bankers continue to believe in what they do, and deeply resent people proving that their decision making is no better than chance. We all know who pays for that. The choice for countries like the UK and the US is whether as a society that appears to require a fat economy, we want to drive that industry from our borders through legislation, or not. That is a possible outcome, and maybe even desirable, but it does carry a heavy price of jobs, income, and status.

The fact is that everything we know about the history of banking shows that the money is made on the edges. We know that is how the heart of the banking industry beats. Bob Diamond knew how to make that work, and we have now hung him out as a scapegoat for our own refusal to accept that banking is not an honest game, however much we may wish to delude ourselves it could be. Bob Diamond is an exceptional professional, who is possibly the best at what he does. Not may people can say that. Hate the game, not the player.

However, Nineteen Eighty-Four had something that the other two couldn’t even touch – the Newspeak appendix. If you haven’t read it, then read it, but for now just know that Orwell described how chopping up vocabulary and grammar allowed the totalitarian ruling party – Big Brother – to control what people were capable of thinking. Ever since I read that, I have always been fascinated with the notion that if we don’t have the word we can’t think the thought. In Orwell’s world, this is mostly about removing words like ‘freedom’ or ‘rebellion’, etc. (hello China) but there is no reason why it would be restricted to concepts like that.

So, it dawned on me a couple of weeks ago, how fascinating it is that now, twenty years after I first started understanding the potential impact of reducing a language instead of expanding  it, we are presented with the reduction of basic emotions by made up bullshit words like ‘defriend’ or (gut wrenching for any lover of the English language) ‘unlike’. Those words and others are common parlance now, and how intriguing that they would have been created by that digital nation we have all rushed to live in, Facebook.

For a start, these words are stupid. They are a really poor excuse for quite sophisticated emotions. More insidiously, they are allowed in a very limited fashion by the very beast that created them in the first place – how many people have said to you “I wanted to Unlike a status or comment, but Like is the only option”. That’s interesting in itself, but nowhere near as interesting as this new vocabulary being introduced by an omnipresent beast that encourages you, nay, demands that you share every innermost secret with it – What do you think? Where do you live? What do you like? – and then tracking every part of your behaviour you dare expose to its electronic brain, and then offering you a very limited choice of what to look at or do (read: think about) based on what you have a history of doing. Do you think we are a million miles from having a large screen in our houses permanently logged into Facebook? Most houses have that already – the only difference being that we are (temporarily) allowed an off button.

Is it only me, or is this a dream coming true? If so, is ‘dream’ the right description?