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Gentle Reader, picture if you will a vast and glittering edifice, built not of stone but of speculation, soaring ever upward on the confident breath of investors who have never once been wrong about anything – until, of course, they were. This Author has been studying the dispatches from the Royal Treasury this Thursday morning, and the portrait they paint is one of extraordinary ambition teetering upon a rather wobbly ledge.
Lord Bailey, Governor of the Royal Treasury, has issued what one might charitably call a cautionary whisper and less charitably call a politely worded scream. The artificial intelligence industry has attracted such colossal sums – the chipmaker Nvidia alone commands a valuation of some five and a half trillion American dollars – that Lord Bailey sees fit to warn that “not everybody always wins.” A revelation so profound it has presumably been cross-stitched onto a cushion somewhere in Threadneedle Street. He allows that the technology has “great potential”, while noting that the big bets may not pay off. The Thinking Engine Establishment and the Open Intelligence Society are readying themselves to sell shares to an eager public. Should the bubble burst, one suspects the sound will be heard from the Kingdom to the American Colonies. Do mind your investments, Gentle Reader.
From financial vapours to rather more literal ones. The government’s new Vaping Product Duty has crept into force today, imposing a levy of £2.20 per 10ml of e-liquid upon those who find satisfaction in inhaling flavoured clouds. The stated purpose is to make the habit less appealing to the young and the impressionable. Whether it will succeed is another matter entirely: one nineteen-year-old in Reading declared herself “fine” with the duty and announced she would simply “stock up”, which is precisely the sort of brisk mercantile spirit this nation was built upon. Tobacco duties rose simultaneously, which HMRC assures us maintains the financial incentive to vape rather than smoke. This Author finds the entire arrangement rather like charging more for one vice in order to make another vice comparatively attractive. A triumph of fiscal philosophy.
Meanwhile, in the grand theatre of Things That Might One Day Help But Currently Alarm The Teaching Unions, a major report has recommended that children as young as four years old should be introduced to the world of work. The author of the report, former minister Alan Milburn, envisions employers trooping cheerfully into primary schools to explain the joys of gainful employment to children who, one imagines, are still mastering the art of tying their shoelaces. The Office of National Statistics tells us that 981,000 sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds are currently not in education, employment, or training – a number sufficiently alarming to make even the most hardened observer reach for the smelling salts. Mr Milburn’s solution: start earlier, make work experience mandatory for fourteen-to-sixteen-year-olds, and for heaven’s sake let an employer through the school gates. The teaching unions, predictably, have noted the “significant pressure” already bearing down upon schools. This Author notes that the children of the Kingdom are apparently required to sort out the economy before they are old enough to vote in one.
This Author pauses now, and sets down her pen with rather more tenderness than usual. Dame Esther Rantzen, broadcaster, campaigner, and one of the genuinely formidable forces for good that this nation has produced, died on Wednesday at the age of eighty-six. She founded Childline in 1986 – a telephone helpline born from her refusal to look away from what she saw on her programme, and from the knowledge that children had nowhere to turn. Prime Minister Lord Burnham said she had “changed countless lives”; that is, for once, no exaggeration. The Broadcasting Society‘s director general called her a “legend of British broadcasting” whose contribution was “immeasurable”. For a woman of such warm and stubborn conviction, no other word will quite serve. Society is diminished, and the children of this Kingdom are safer for her having lived.
On a note rather less elevated: Ivan Toney, the England striker presently employed by a club in the Saudi leagues, appeared this Thursday at the Capital’s Petty Sessions to deny assaulting a gentleman at a Soho nightclub last December. The charge – headbutting and punching, which are not generally considered among the recognised skills of a professional footballer, or indeed anyone frequenting a nightclub – was entered as not guilty. Ivan Toney has elected for a Crown Court trial, with a hearing at Southwark scheduled for the 29th of this month. He was released on unconditional bail. This Author observes only that a man who played in a European Championship final now faces a rather different sort of high-stakes contest. The game continues.
I am, as ever, your most devoted observer – Lady Whistledown.