When can kicking goes wrong
The problem with storing up problems. Plus a bit on TikTok, some music thoughts, and a quick addendum to last week's Spanish FA piece.
Hello and welcome back. I hope this finds you enjoying the first (and last) days of the summer.
You may have noticed we’re coming to you a day later again. Contrary to popular opinion, this wasn’t actually a case of me failing to write the edition in time but a clever thematic choice to reflect the missive’s content (put those eyebrows down). Specifically, we’re talking about putting things off, inspired by the country’s sudden pressing education infrastructure problem.
I also own up to being out-of-touch with the youth, there’s a bit on some of this year’s Mercury-nominated albums, and a very quick post-script to my Spanish FA note last week.
All arranged as follows:
Now pondering
Now ageing
Now listening
A Spanish FA post-script (one-off special)
Now pondering
(Or why putting things off isn’t always best)
A minor confession: I love a bit of can kicking. My natural tendency is to follow the famous Benjamin Franklin quote: “Do not do today that which can be put off until tomorrow. Or ideally the day after.” Or something like that, I’ll double check it later.
Future Andrew gets a lot of stuff in the mail from Present Andrew, something Future Andrew doesn’t always appreciate when he’s haring around the supermarket trying to find ingredients for a dinner he’s already meant to be cooking. But it’s not all bad: as a result Future Andrew is pretty good at working under pressure and he can’t half bang out a quick 2,000 words in double-time when he’s forced to.
So I can see some pros of procrastination for individuals, but I’m not 100% convinced that the same can be said for businesses and organisations. For example, if you will forgive me another Chelsea dig, I suspect their billion pound outlay on players in the last 12 months is storing up a few problems down the line.
Not least because, in order to stay within UEFA and the FA’s financial fair play (FFP) rules, the club are using some clever accounting to reallocate the spend: Future Chelsea are paying!
Specifically, by giving their new signings lengthy contracts of seven or eight years, the transfer fees they pay now are amortised over the length of the player’s deal and only go into the accounts each season as a percentage of the total cost. For example the £115m spent on Moises Caicedo this summer is in the books as just over £14m per year until 2031. Smart workaround? Maybe. But given their track record they may be stuck with some very expensive players for a very long time who they cannot offload. And those liabilities are still going to be on their books when they need to spend another £100m on Brighton’s next half-decent midfield prospect in January.
It wasn’t just the comedy stylings of Chelsea past, present and future that got me thinking about this, however. Perhaps a touch more seriously, I’m not sure any real advantages are bestowed to Future UK when the Government of the day indulges in its own versions of can-kicking.
This was, of course, brought into sharp focus this week in the form of the emergency closure of schools just before the start of the new academic year. It’s an issue that’s been coming for some while: a National Audit office report from June flagged that 24,000 school buildings in use - out of a total of 64,000 - are past their concrete sell-by-date.
The same report outlines that, since 2021, the Treasury has only allocated enough money to cover 75% of the Department for Education’s estimated required capital expenditure on schools (both redevelopment and maintenance) - a shortfall of around one billion pounds. So Past UK saved some money, passed the liabilities on to Future UK, and we are now left with emergency repairs that will be a lot more expensive than the cost of fixing the buildings before they were about to collapse on some kids. Not to mention the disruption to pupils.
Lest I be accused of breaching Substack’s strict impartiality rules, I am not poised to launch into another grossly unfair characterisation of Rishi Sunak as a right-wing, penny-pinching fiscal Conservative who is completely out of touch with the reality of the country he governs. Of course, the Tories have been in power for thirteen years and hold plenty of responsibility for the current mess. But it’s not just a Tory issue.
After all, it was the coalition Government (hi Nick!) who scrapped Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, a project to ‘renew’ - i.e. rebuild or refurbish - every secondary school in the country.
And that Building Schools programme, itself heavily flawed, relied on the huge expansion of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) by New Labour. PFIs led to lots of new buildings going up but saddled public bodies with significant long-term financial commitments - and crucially kept the expenditure off the UK’s balance sheet. Todd Boehly eat your heart out.
Of course the issue is not limited to schools: unsurprisingly other public buildings such as hospitals and courts are impacted (although allowing some courts to collapse might be a very clever way to counterbalance the cost of unused justice buildings. Maybe).
Basically, we’re in a mess. And we can certainly blame successive Governments of all stripes for putting things off to the point buildings are so unsafe the problem cannot be ignored anymore. But as a master procrastinator, I know one key buttress against a good can kick is having someone or something to hold you to account, whether that’s a firm work deadline or an adoring Substack audience hanging on your every word (right?....right??)
For the Government, presumably one of those ‘things’ is the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). According to its own mission statement, the OBR exists “to provide independent and authoritative analysis of the UK’s public finance” including “the long-term sustainability of the public finances”. You would think monitoring “the long-term sustainability of the public finances” might include assessing if the Government has allocated enough money to fixing known, time-critical problems.
So where the hell has the OBR been during all of this?
As Dan Davies pointed out on Twitter back in July, before the whole RAAC issue became such an immediate priority, not factoring in known future capital costs is pretty crap financial planning/manoeuvring:
If you accept that Governments are incentivised to minimise reported spending, it follows they will likely employ said shoddy accounting tricks if they can.
Such a scenario - where we have an issue, we know we will have to spend money on it, we are not doing so now, and we have not budgeted for it in the future - is surely the exact sort of long-term financial issue the OBR are meant to monitor. Yet they have been silent on public buildings, for years. That, to me, is the biggest scandal here.
Now ageing
(or: OK, Millennial)
There are some classic staging posts in one’s life that mark the gradual shift from cool young thing to over-the-hill has-been. Recognising new songs because they’re covers of the ones that came out when you were younger. Switching from Radio 1 to Radio 2. Noticing ‘the kids’ wearing what you wore twenty years ago. And you can now add to that list my current fascination: not getting TikTok.
I ‘get’ TikTok in the sense that I understand the general attraction of short fun videos, popular culture, and finely tuned algorithms wringing every last drop of engagement from users, developed by the Chinese Government (allegedly).
But every time I read about a trend on TikTok my reaction is invariably ‘what the hell is going on there?’ This week it was an article in the Verge, flagged by Helen Lewis in her excellent Bluestocking Substack.
It concerns the dissociative identity disorder (DID) community that has grown on the platform and that community’s (aggressive) response to a Harvard Medical School clinician’s lecture questioning how real the phenomenon is.
DID, formerly multiple personality disorder, is typically a trauma-induced psychological condition where the patient develops at least two independent personality states. It seems more and more people on TikTok either have, or believe they have, the condition and are creating videos on the subject, often with their various personalities. They refer to themselves as ‘systems’.
This sort of medical trend, which often centres around psychological and neurological conditions, has been a feature of TikTok for a while. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, and Tourette’s have all featured heavily in TikTok world, with some purported positives (e.g. ‘destigmatisation’ of conditions) and plenty of worrying outcomes.
I kind of understand how this sort of thing might come about: very impressionable, very online teenagers searching for an understanding of why they are ‘different’ (I seem to be using a lot of inverted commas in this section) are probably pretty suggestible and finding a community to be a part of tick(tok)s a lot of boxes.
But it still blows my withered old mind that these trends can crop up and spread so easily. In my day everything was absolutely fine on social media and there were no issues whatsoever (apart from the odd gatecrashed house party). I really worry for young people.
And thus the great baton of being out of touch passes from one generation to the next.
Quick addendum to Spanish FA omnishambles
A couple of weeks ago I used a Woody Allen quote (‘Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television’) to describe the insane progression of events following Luis Rubiales’, the President of the Spanish FA (maybe Spanish WTAF?), non-consensual kiss of player Jenni Hermoso at the World Cup (Rubiales fans will be pleased to hear his hunger-striking mother has been discharged from hospital).
At the time I noted that it perhaps wasn’t quite right to be referencing Allen. Staggeringly, he has actually gone out of his way to prove my point. Speaking to a Spanish publication, he weighed in on the matter himself, saying, “He wasn’t raping her, it was just a kiss and she was a friend. What’s wrong with that?”
Jesus H Christ.
Now listening
The September playlist isn’t quite yet up-and-running so we’ll be back next week with the usual song recommendations but I did want to flag this week’s Mercury Music Prize nominations.
You will be unsurprised to learn that I’m happy Fred Again’s Actual Life 3 has made the list but there’s also a couple of other albums in there that I’ve enjoyed and wanted to mention.
Firstly, I love Loyle Carner so I’m chuffed hugo has also been given the nod. It’s a great record and he raps with such disarming openness and honesty that it’s impossible not to like the guy. Plus he does great work for important causes like mental health awareness and runs a brilliantly named cookery school for children with ADHD: Chilli Con Carner. I’m still torn as to whether I prefer hugo or his second album Not Waving, But Drowning but they are both packed with great tunes and deep verses that are worth your ears’ attention.
Secondly, and something very different, Lankum’s False Lankum. It’s difficult to describe succinctly (the Guardian’s review talks about their ‘gothic intensity’) but broadly sits in what you might call dark folk music. I personally prefer its quieter moments to the more heavy sections but it has some compelling tracks and is certainly bold. (Side note: it feels like Irish folk seems to be having a bit of a year - The Mary Wallopers’ first album is a great listen too).
Fin
That’s your lot for this week. Like, comment, share etc and I’m sure Future Andrew will buy you a drink at some point.
And do subscribe if you enjoy in order to get Scher Drops delivered straight to you every week. I’m fairly confident that, at the very least, this is the only Substack combining football finance, OBR critique, Simpsons memes, and random bits of music.
Until next time.