• Change

Yes: a first-world problem, you retort. But is it? Most of us use communication devices of some kind. There are about 16 billion mobile phones in the world, outnumbering the possible users by about two to one. All of them, and all the more conventional devices such as the Mac in the photo above (actually, its replacement), use programmes, or apps as we now have to call them. How these are configured, what they can or cannot do and – as importantly – when the changes are introduced (usually without warning) are now completely outside our control.

Time was when, if you had some software that did what you wanted, you tended to keep with that version and didn’t bother with upgrades unless either your computer packed up or you were shown by someone else just how far behind the curve you were. Although for this reason, and certainly for me, upgrades were often performed at times of stress, there was at least a sense of knowing that from here on the thing was going to look and perhaps be different. Also, if you were organised you could do it at a time of your choosing.

Sometimes this conservatism is a disaster. For years I happily recorded my songs using the music sequencing programme Logic 9. The day came when the music Mac packed up and I had to get a new one and upgraded to Logic X. I’d hung onto the old version for so long that there had been a zillion changes since. When I started using X, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was as if I’d been hit over the head in a pub brawl in 1623 and woken up 300 years later to find everyone speaking a version of English I couldn’t understand. My song recording has all but dried up as a result. Some might argue this is no bad thing.

• No control

Now, almost all software is updated and managed remotely. The days of getting a pack of CDs are long past. Younger readers might be surprised that computers used to have CD drives at all. Now, when a change is made, it happens in the background. Often, and this is good, it’s without our knowing. Dealing with bugs and the like is one thing. What pisses me off is switching on the device to do a job and finding that something, often quite a big thing, has changed, and often pointlessly.

Take Mailchimp, the generally excellent programme we use to send our newsletters. In the past year, they seem to have employed a team of people to make needless changes to the back-end reports. Familiar buttons are moved or vanish, to be replaced by others that often do the same thing but are called something different. Things that were small are now large, while previously dominant features are now almost invisible. Colours, that most convenient wayfinder, are changed.

It’s a bit like waking up and finding that overnight someone has come in and rearranged several items in your kitchen, repainted a couple of walls and swapped your glasses for ones with the opposite prescription.

What’s particularly irritating is that there’s rarely any recognition that these changes have happened, or why, and no way you can comment on them. If by some miracle you get to talk to a human and explain a problem this has caused, there’s a genuine incredulity that matters were ever otherwise. Development happens seemingly without reference to the people dealing with the complaints.

Moreover, it appears to take place not because a change is necessary, but because it’s possible. This pursuit of novelty is keeping some people in good jobs while driving the rest of us half out of our minds.

Mailchimp recently changed a very clear and useful graph into a minute and confusing visual car crash in which almost every possible graphic-design error had been committed. To my delight, after half an hour on a chat with someone from the company last Friday, the Mailchimper admitted that the result was awful and would raise it as a complaint immediately.

An email from the company today said that it was closing the case as it felt the problem had been sorted. I wrote back and said that, on the contrary, so far it hadn’t. A further 30 minutes has been pencilled in Friday’s diary for another online chat if it hasn’t been.

Mailchimp is big enough to run its email service properly, but not so big that it’s severed all relations with its customers. The same cannot be said for Apple, a company whose computers I’ve bought, forsaking all others, since I was about 25. About four years ago, again overnight, it removed the wonderful way you could, at a click, colour a folder in the Finder. I used this all the time – red for financial, green for editorial, purple for the inevitable miscellaneous and so on.

This was replaced by a rather vapid system of small coloured dots that weren’t nearly as good. About six emails of complaint were met with the total indifference that Apple clearly felt I deserved.

About three years ago, I managed to speak to an intelligent Apple human about a problem with my iCloud email account. At the end of this, I mentioned the folder change. As I was expecting, and had encountered before elsewhere, he had no idea what I was talking about. “But you can use the tags,” he said. I explained that they didn’t do the job nearly as well.

Finally, he got it. “You mean, colouring the entire folder icon?” I said he’d grasped the point. “That would be really useful,” he enthused. For a moment, I thought he was going to elevate this to the remote stratosphere of product development, perhaps claiming the idea as his own. Then I made my fatal mistake.

“But you used to have this feature,” I told him. “For at least the last 25 years, ever since the operating system used colour.”

That killed it. This was an old idea, and so contemptible. The new was, by being new, bound to be better. To hark back to the past was not a concept Apple could entertain. Change, particularly when its competitors least expected it (and to hell with its customers) was the way forward. Those who favour the old must be smited and cast into the outer darkness: thus it is written.

This reaction was one, I admit, that I inferred from a pause and a small sigh. “That’s something you need to contact the development team about,” he said, his affable manner now completely changed. He didn’t offer me a means of contacting them and I didn’t ask. We both knew it was pointless.

• And your point is…?

I’m not sure. Penny Post’s webmaster (who solved yet another such problem this week which resulted in every page on our website changing to Times New Roman as an indirect result of a WordPress plug-in update), is of the view that everything on the internet has in recent years become less controllable, more expensive, less human, more complex and generally more rubbish. One could could argue the toss on certain points but it seems a broadly fair assessment to me. Worse still, I don’t see what I can do about this.

The biggest problem is that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and a few others have created a small number of monopolies utterly without parallel in human history. If they were all to power-down tomorrow, life as many people know it would grind to a halt. Many smaller (though still large) firms like Adobe, Mailchimp and WordPress exercise a similar level of tyranny over their particular areas of expertise.

When their products work well, we take it for granted. When they make mysterious changes we have to put up with it. If they go down for an hour (or, and it may happen, for good), we can’t cope. We are now no more than high-functioning serfs in a world dominated by a few feudal lords who conduct matters as they see fit. True, we get more benefits than did our medieval ancestors (though the protection offered, when it was, was no small advantage). However, we have effectively no influence over how these things affect us. Our only recourse is to opt out altogether.

It was ever thus, of course. A few control and the rest of us endure. It’s unfair to equate Apple’s removal of the folder-colouring feature with the rape and pillage of marauding medieval armies or the persecutions of the medieval Catholic Church. None the less, the relationship is essentially the same. So too is the effect that a dominant power has on our brains and our worldview.

We are conditioned to think in the way that they demand if we are to engage with them. The prison may be more comfortable than in past times and with better wi-fi, but we’re still at someone else’s mercy: just in a different way. The customer service hasn’t greatly improved, either…

• Budget time

On 30 October, Rachel Reeves became the first female Chancellor to deliver a budget in the UK. Perhaps more significantly, she was only the third Chancellor since 1979 (1987 and 2010 being the other cases) to deliver one for an incoming party.

Much of her early comments developed the “it’s all their fault” mantra that we’ve been hearing since July. Black holes, incomplete information, unfunded promises, financial irresponsibility – for the benefit of the larger audience, these points were hammered home.

The trick she tried to pull off was to keep Labour’s new friends in the City happy without alienating its old friends in the workplace, whatever that term now means. Business seems set to pay for about half of her £40bn tax rises (although this is likely to trickle down to impact employees and customers), a move she says she does not want to repeat. Time will tell. After all, this was not a central plank of her party’s manifesto.

The Guardian suggested that she “used her budget debut to announce a massive package of tax, spending and borrowing increases as she gambled on voters rewarding the government for patching up Britain’s crumbling public services.” Time will tell on that as well.

Local experts Butler Toll Financial Advice and Asset Management suggested that there were two big gambles. The first is that a big cash injection for public services over the next two years will be enough to turn performance around, and that many of the temporary spending pressures won’t persist.

The second is that this extra borrowing will be worthwhile. Under pre-election plans we were set to borrow an average of £59 billion per year over the next four years. We now expect to borrow an average of £85 billion. The hope is that the benefits – from more funding for public services in the next couple of years, and from more public investment throughout the parliament – will more than offset the costs.

There was disappointment for those who wish to believe that the government is truly committed to combating climate change with a freeze on fuel duty. There was also little in the way of serious tax reform. One point that Butler Toll picked up on was the extent to which the spending plans are front-loaded, with much of the benefit set to be felt in the next two years. This may do little more than deal with some immediate problems and might lead to some uncomfortably tight settlement from April 2026.

Carbon Brief has issued its own reaction to the announcement, which touches on this very point. This suggests that: “Increasing fuel duty is very unpopular and there has been a strong lobbying effort to block it. The Sun, the UK’s most widely read newspaper, has sustained a ’14-year campaign’, promoted by climate-sceptic motoring lobbyists and applauded by senior Conservatives, to keep fuel duty frozen.”

The statement goes on to say that: “Despite the framing by both the government and The Sun, analysis by think tank the Social Market Foundation shows that the poorest households benefit far less from lower fuel duty than the richest, who tend to drive more and own more vehicles.”

You can click here to see Butler Toll’s summary of what the budget might mean for you.

The country’s beleaguered local councils will have been looking at the announcements very carefully. Shortly after the presentation was over, we spoke to West Berkshire Council’s Leader Jeff Brooks, who gave his immediate reaction to the budget, in so far as the available detail currently permitted useful comment. You can see this in the “Across the area” section below.

• The rain in Spain

Anyone who’s in any doubt about the reality of climate change and the effect it’s having on us need look no further than these harrowing images from the floods in Southern Spain which has claimed over 150 lives so far. The BBC article admits that: “Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.” One of the reasons for this is that warm air can hold more moisture than cold, air at 20ºC being able to take twice as much as that at 10ºC. Even small temperature rises can and do therefore produce more catastrophic storms.

Centuries of experience and building construction may have proved adequate for most circumstances in the past, but they aren’t now. So-called once-in-100-year events are now taking place almost annually. The emergency relief work, the clean-ups and the replacement of damaged goods and infrastructure all burn more resources, so making the problem worse next time round.

Spain is not a remote place in the Sahel, the Indian Ocean or Antarctica, but only two countries away from us on the map. In 2023, about 17 million Briton visited it. We already know that, certainly in our part of the UK (which is not the most vulnerable) we should brace ourselves for a very wet winter. Will our public services be able to cope with it? It seems unlikely. Will the government’s determination to address climate change help to fix the long-term issue? Sadly, there seem to be few signs of that, either.

• Remote meetings

During the pandemic, the government permitted councils to conduct meeting remotely using the then new-fangled technology of Zoom or Teams. This didn’t last long, however, and as soon as they felt it was safe to do so, it forced these people, many of whom were unpaid town and parish councillors, back into their draughty village halls to breathe over one another while considering planning applications and grant requests.

They could still meet remotely but, due to the archaic way the regulations were constructed, they couldn’t vote except in person unless they wanted to risk a legal challenge to any decisions so taken. Being unwilling to risk that, all fell into line (some found a work-around by delegating recommendations to the Clerk to approve, but this didn’t really catch on).

The government now appears to have recognised that the 21st century is here to stay (as, for that matter, is the threat of pandemics). Many thanks to Graham Bridgman from Stratfield Mortimer PC for bringing this consultation (which closes on 19 December) to my attention.

The preamble says that it “seeks views on the detail and practical implications of allowing remote and hybrid attendance at local authority meetings. It also tests views on the possible introduction of proxy voting for those occasions when an elected member, due to personal circumstances, may be unable to attend even remotely.”

Responses are invited “from local authority elected members, all types and tiers of authorities and local authority sector representative organisations.

“We are also particularly keen to hear from those members of the public who have a point of view based on their interest in accessing local democracy in their area, or standing as a candidate for local government at any tier to represent their local community at some future point.” That appears to include potentially pretty much everyone…

 • And finally…

• I’m no fan of Manchester United but, so big does the club loom in the popular consciousness, any of its ructions are seized on with a schadenfreude that I am, perhaps unworthily, delighted to join. The recent turmoil has been caused by the slow descent into opprobrium experienced by former manager Erik ten Hag, who was relieved of his increasingly untenable position earlier this week.

The fact that Man U is seen as such a great club is due to two people, Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson, who between them ran the team for over 50 of the 80 years since 1945 (there have been 15 others), in the process winning most of the trophies the club has accumulated (including all but one of the five European competitions and all but two of the 20 league titles).

The problem with success like this is that for anyone else, the club has become unmanageable. This was not helped by the two former gaffers hanging around in various vague sporting director roles, so completely undermining the authority of their successors. Translating this idea into politics, it’s perhaps best for a party when its former leaders leave in disgrace or defeat (as Thatcher and most of her Conservative successors did) rather than still seemingly full of zip: Blair’s kind-of non-departure didn’t seem to help the Labour Party in the 14 years that followed.

Albert Camus – who was a decent goalkeeper as well as the author of a few books – said that “everything I know about life I have learned from football.” The reverse perhaps applies as well.

• And still with the beautiful game, The Guardian reports that The Football Association has apologised to Muslim footballer Iqra Ismail after she was barred by the referee from playing in a match for refusing to wear shorts “due to her religious beliefs” and that the governing body has assured her that “she will be able to wear tracksuit bottoms in future matches.” My sympathies are with the ref on this, not with her. I’m 100% behind the recent growth in women’s team sports and would support anyone who made a stand on the basis of discrimination on any matter because of their gender, sexual orientation, race, age or disability.

This isn’t what we’re talking about here. Religion is not, as some claim, a divine determinant of morality but a human construct. It is also, unlike the others, an optional aspect of life and its restrictions are not ones we have to accept and nor should society’s rules be bended to its whims. This distinction has, alarmingly, been allowed to become very blurred.

• The US election edges ever closer, as does the gap between the two candidates. The thought of another disputed result fills me with despondency, although many Americans (and their legal teams) are probably already starting to file claims in respect of elections that haven’t even taken place. The contest was enlivened recently by the sight of Trump dishing up burgers and fries at a McDonald’s. “How long will you be serving?” one of his short-term co-workers asked him, according to the cover of the latest (1635) Private Eye. “That’s up to the judge,” Donald McRonald replied.

• Still with the latest Eye open on the desk, and returning to the football theme, I see that on p10 a comparison is drawn between the recent fulminations by the delightful Daily Mail against the appointment of the German Thomas Tuchel as manager of England men’s football team and a comment from the same paper in 1933 by the then owner Viscount Rothermere in praise of, as the Eye puts it, “the the new German manager Adolf Hitler”. Attentive readers may have noticed that exactly this point was made last week by our Hamburg correspondent Owen Jones in his article about Tuchel’s new job. Good to know that Lord Gnome seems to be a Penny Post reader…