If Britain's broke, how can so many people afford a new iPhone?
Austerity, what austerity? Across the country, people have been laying siege to Apple stores to buy the new iPhone 4.
In London’s Regent Street and Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, hundreds queued through the night.
They were banging on the doors at 8am to be the first to get their hands on this must-have mobile.
Broke Britain? Hundreds queued for the new £500 iPhone
More than 600,000 orders have already been taken in Britain, even though the basic model costs £499, rising to £599.
It was a similar story when Apple recently released its tablet-sized iPad computer.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple products. They make my working life simpler. I’ve got a desktop, a laptop and an iPhone. None of them came cheap.
But I wouldn’t dream of sleeping on the pavement to be the first kid on the block with the latest model. I’m more than happy with my old, steam-driven iPhone. It’s marvellous, even though I use a fraction of its capacity and capability.
Steve Jobs and his company have an uncanny ability to drive the market through innovation. I’ve only had my phone a few months and even though it hasn’t been rendered obsolete overnight by the new model, it’s already out-of-date.
That shame is simply too much for some people to bear, hence the stampede for the iPhone 4. They can’t all be rushing to beat the rise in Vat to 20 per cent.
Fortunately, I’ve never felt the need to be at the cutting edge. You always pay through the nose for the latest technology. Wait a few months and the price comes crashing down.
Good luck to those who can’t live without an iPhone 4 from day one — it’s their money.
But surely anyone who can afford £500 for a non-essential gadget can’t complain too much about having to pay a little more tax to get the country out of a financial black hole.
This week’s Budget has been described in cataclysmic terms. George Osborne has been portrayed as a mad axeman salivating at the prospect of driving the vulnerable into the poor house.
While the state is being cut back — and not before time — increases in taxes and reductions in child benefits will leave the average family £350 a year worse off.
Those earning more than £50,000 will lose around £700.
These are not insignificant sums and will bite at the lower end of the income scale.
But is asking the average family to get by on £350 less (under £7 a week) for a couple of years really ‘savage’? Difficult, maybe. Unwelcome, certainly. But not terminal.
These days, £350 won’t even buy you a new iPhone.
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But hundreds of thousands people are queuing up for one.
Same with iPads, at £429 a pop.
This summer, electronics retailers report record sales of big screen, hi-def TVs, for the World Cup, costing up to £2,000.
Replica England football shirts have been flying off the shelves at £48 a time.
They can’t all be 15 quid fakes from the Far East.
Tens of thousands of fans have bought expensive packages to South Africa.
For many, it won’t be their only foreign holiday of the year. When the schools break up in a couple of weeks, the airports will be teeming with families, spending thousands of pounds heading for the beaches of the Med and the theme parks of Florida.
There never seems to be any shortage of money to pay for life’s luxuries.
We live in an age of unparalleled private affluence, even if we are saddled with unprecedented public debt.
I’m not being insensitive to the plight of the genuine poor and the elderly on dwindling fixed incomes.
But most people can find some painless economies in their discretionary spending.
John Redwood has been mocked unfairly for suggesting people switch to fresh veg instead of expensive processed food, and wear a jumper indoors during the winter, so they can turn down the thermostat to reduce heating bills.
Savings can be achieved without major sacrifice in most households.
What prevents so many people from tightening their belts is the extraordinary sense of entitlement which has grown up over the past couple of decades.
We have been led to believe that the casino will always pay out, that the days of spend-now, pay-later will go on for ever.
Iain Duncan Smith’s most difficult task in slaying the welfare monster will be attempting to redefine the meaning of ‘poverty’.
Under labour the idea has been encouraged that everyone has an inalienable right to a flat-screen TV and a mobile phone, even if taxpayers have to pick up the bill.
That mindset has to change, and those on welfare given incentives to get back to work, so they can earn their own money to buy the latest electronic toys.
As a nation, we’ve had a hell of a run, living way beyond our means.
The party’s over now. If we stop squealing and bite the bullet, the good times will return. Who knows, in a few years we’ll all be able to afford an iPhone 5, even with Vat at 20 per cent.
The economic cycle
Gordon Brown finally surfaced at Westminster yesterday. Blink and you would have missed him. Apparently he was only there for a couple of minutes.
Maybe he intends to claim the bottle of champagne this column has been offering for proof he is still alive.
Some people think Gordon should have been allowed to sulk in private. But while he continued to draw a parliamentary salary without reporting for work, I was reluctant to call off the posse.
On yer bike! Is that Gordon taking part in a naked cycling race?
So where, exactly, has he been hiding? There have been a number of unconfirmed sightings.
Helen Wilson snapped this photograph of someone who looks remarkably like Gordon taking part in a naked cycling race, which passed in front of her tea shop in Brighton.
As for the competitor in the gimp mask, Helen wonders if it might be Peter Mandelson.
Flip me! At last, an honest MP
Congratulations to Tory MP John Baron, who has donated £60,000 to charity from the sale of his taxpayer-funded second home.
It represents the net profit he made on the property in Billericay, Essex, on which he had claimed parliamentary expenses for mortgage interest since 2001.
Mr Baron puts to shame all those MPs who have pocketed the profits, especially the likes of former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling and his ex-Cabinet colleague Geoff Hoon, who ‘flipped’ their addresses and built personal property empires using public money.
There is no reason why all MPs should not be forced to repay the profits they have made on taxpayer-subsidised second homes.
While they’re at it, the ‘flippers’ should also be made to cough up the capital gains tax they managed to avoid — ideally at the new top rate of 28 per cent.
A man who had a sex-change operation when he was 59 has won his legal claim to be paid a woman’s pension.
Christine (formerly Christopher) Timbrell, now 68, sued the Government under the yuman rites act.
The pension will be backdated to his 60th birthday, and runs into tens of thousands of pounds. if he’d remained a man, he wouldn’t have received his pension until he was 65.
Britain is facing a pensions crisis, and there is talk of us having to work into our 70s.
Even so, despite this ruling, I can’t see many men going down the sex-change route. That’s what i call a painful cut.
My dustbin's full of Lily's
A couple of weeks ago I wondered who would want to live in a wheelie bin, following the issuing of new elf’n’safety guidelines to dustmen.
They now have to check before emptying that there’s no one lurking inside, after three people were crushed to death.
Elsie Harris writes to tell me that her neighbour in County Durham heard a noise coming from the wheelie bin in his back yard.
When he went to investigate, he saw a man running away.
The wheelie bin was on its side and, as he approached, a woman in her underwear clambered out and made good her escape.
As Winston Churchill is said to have remarked when told one of his ministers had been caught in a compromising position with a guardsman in St James’s Park on a particularly freezing winter’s evening: Makes you proud to be British.
According to one survey this week, most people over 45 have pretty much given up on sex — especially if they’re married.
Then yesterday another survey claimed that there’s been a dramatic increase in sexually transmitted diseases among the over-45s because of a rise in the number of middle-aged swingers.
They can’t both be right. Or am I missing something here?
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