For Hindus in the UK, demand for places of worship outstrips supply. The result is that everyone just has to get on

"Was there a swimming pool there as well?" my mate Laurie asked when I told him about the Hindu temple I visited in Ilford. I forgive him his irreverence, because the temple in question is a converted leisure centre – and not the only one in London.

With its 13,000 gods (and counting) scattered all around India, Hinduism has traditionally had more than its share of warring factions. Accounts of disagreements between devotees of Shiva and Vishnu, the two major gods, go back to 2nd century AD. And contrary to some claims, the caste system is alive and kicking, as is the north-south divide, and naturally these are reflected in places of worship.

But the temple I saw in London had them all (so it seemed) side by side to pick from, and pray to. Some of the deities are so lined up so choc-a-bloc that you could pray to one god, and then shift your bum slightly and pray to a second.

Basically, this odd form of reconciliation is driven by lack of space and funds, and convenience for Indian professionals – with half-a-million Hindus and more than 300,000 Sikhs living in the UK, demand for places of worship far outstrips the supply.

Some of them – like the Ilford one – are simply old leisure centres converted into a makeshift place of worship, with various deities placed next to each other to allow people from different denominations to pray without having to drive out of the city. Bemused priests perform different rites at different times for different groups of people.

I was first put onto this by my aunt, who lives some of the months of the year in London. I had gone over for a home-cooked meal and found her sprawled across the sofa in exhaustion. Like most of us at one point or another, she got sucked into an outing with relatives from the more-Indian-than-the-Indians community in London, and they had dragged her along to see the Selvavinayagar temple (Vinayagar is the Tamil name for the elephant god more commonly known as Ganesha).

"The whole thing is really bizarre," she said as she dragged herself out of the sofa and headed to the kitchen to fulfil the promise of a home-cooked meal that had lured me there in the first place. "It's like having a buffet of gods to choose from!"

An hour later, suitably fed and watered, my curiosity was piqued. I got the address of the temple from her and went across to see for myself.

She was dead right. Bizarre is the only word to describe the temple.

I dragged one of the work-experience lads from my company along, and the head priest deigned to have a chat with us, after making me do a little round to pray to each of the deities.

"This is mainly a Tamil temple dedicated to Vinayagar, but we get a wide mixture of people coming," he told me in Tamil. The temple has the main Vinayagar deity placed in the centre, but other idols of gods such as Shiva and Durga cater to the North Indian worshippers in East London. How do the priests manage all of them?

"Actually, I am trained in many different rituals," he says. Having passed on the training to his two colleagues, the three priests now take turns.

"The situation has come about because people find it difficult to travel to individual temples, which are often outside the city or in the outskirts" he says. But he feels that the concept demonstrates the flexibility of Hinduism. "Hinduism is essentially flexible – but this has been forgotten in India where some temples don't allow worshippers of other religions in, others make it mandatory [for men] to take off your shirt and all that sort of thing," he said.

Big temples do have several sanctums dedicated to different gods, but these are suitably spread apart to spare the orthodox worshippers any annoyance.

I discovered soon that there was a similar temple in Highgate dedicated to Murugan, the second son of Shiva and Parvati (the first is Ganesha), reasonably close to my house, and I started going there. One day, after the puja, I decided to have a chat with some of the people there; the general consensus was that it was a reasonable solution of convenience. A lot of them simply could not afford to travel to temple spots outside of London on a regular basis, and put up with deities en masse.

Some of them even found benefits. Jaya, originally from Gujarat, said: "I did not know much about Lord Murugan - he seems to be worshipped more by Tamilians. After coming to this temple, I started doing some research, and found the history very moving. He caters to more the suppressed classes, who identify more with the younger and not-so-favourite brother. But correct me if I'm wrong!"

For Harsha Vardhan, a suit-and-tied professional, it is an exercise in nostalgia. "The music is familiar, the smells are familiar – I even saw cockroaches crawling across the floor! Nowhere else in London have I seen cockroaches, but step into an Indian temple … it's very reassuring."

Others are not as comfortable with the concept. Lakshmi Ramachandran, in London to do a course in education and visiting the temple for the first time, said: "For me it is an uncomfortable experience, but I can understand why some people find it convenient. For my mother-in-law who has health trouble, it is an easy walk from nearby."

I have to confess at this point that I'm not very religious, so I wouldn't really make the trek out of town to visit a "proper" temple. But during religious festivals, being in London away from family, you can't help feeling a bit empty - and nothing is more soothing than going over to a familiar setting, listening to familiar music, and remembering just how much you hated this sort of thing when you were a kid - and just how much you miss it now. Long live leisure centre temples I say!

But when Sacramento's Charter Review Committee, after seven months of work, presented its final report on the structure of city government to the City Council on Tuesday, it was clear that the committee likes things in Sacramento just the way they are, thank you.

The committee likes having an unelected city manager serve as the chief executive officer of the city, directing all city departments and making policy and annual budget recommendations to the City Council. They like having the mayor, the only city officer elected citywide, simply be another member of the council.

Committee members waxed eloquent about how such a form of government fosters professionalism and a culture of collaboration. Really? Have they visited City Hall lately?

For their part, council members seemed content only to offer praise for the quality of charter committee members and their hard work. They chose not to engage with the substance of the committee's work, making it look as if they hadn't read the report.

One council member, Steve Cohn, offered a substantive (though silly) idea. The council always adopts a budget on time, he said, but the charter should have a provision requiring the mayor and council to forfeit their salaries if a budget isn't passed on time. This is the most important charter change Sacramento should consider?

Council members did, however, mull extending the committee's work beyond its end-of-January sunset. (The committee will make recommendations in December and January on the issues of a full-time City Council, an ethics commission and instant-runoff voting.) Report back to us on other issues you might want to look at, said council member Rob Fong. You need some more time, said Sandy Sheedy. We want the work to continue, said Kevin McCarty. Why?

Lauren Hammond expressed tepid skepticism about the committee's product: "I can't believe your recommendation is basically the same … the status quo with a little tweak." Well, yes, that's what it is.

Mayor Kevin Johnson, who got the last word, could barely contain his impatience. The nation's framers, he observed, produced the U.S. Constitution in three months, 23 days. He dismissed the committee's work as "business as usual."

Committee member Grantland Johnson, a former City Council member, captured the issue best when he told the council that Sacramentans are left with "only two extreme approaches on the table" – the status quo and a strong-mayor initiative that will be on the ballot in June 2010. Yet, he continued, "there are other combinations of change that might make sense."

But the committee didn't consider them. Committee member Chris Tapio tried, unsuccessfully, to get the committee to consider the National Civic League's model city charter, which is a hybrid "mayor-council-chief administrative officer" form of government, and the Long Beach hybrid model. His four-page minority report is worth reading.

Tuesday's meeting revealed a council utterly disengaged on the issue of charter change. The charter review committee's self-satisfied, unimaginative report likely will gather dust on a shelf.

So the board was forced to approve reductions that began July 1: less watering, less frequent lawn-mowing and graffiti removal, closure of some restrooms. People began to notice dying grass, overgrown weeds, more graffiti.

So residents in the newer neighborhoods petitioned for another vote, but with a narrower pool of 900 property owners adjacent to Van Doren Park, Hill Park and Laguna Creek Trail. That meant the proposed fee would have to go up to $130. Voters in October approved it.

Elaine Wright, a member of the board, wrote on these pages Friday, "When the vote was conducted on a wider basis, and included property owners who didn't see the declining condition of those two parks on a daily basis, it was defeated. But when the question was put to people who were witnessing the effect of this reduction in government services, it was approved."

The other folks can still use the parks. So they are free riders. And while those who don't use the parks can breathe a sigh of relief that they were spared a new fee, they too are free riders; parks make their community a better place.

Certainly, it's a good thing that residents near two parks voted new fees to maintain them. But it remains disheartening that broader community support for parks is lacking. A broader base of support would have meant a lower fee.

CORRECTION

Thursday's editorial noting a $100 million earmark for the San Vicente Reservoir, over and above funds already in the water bond bill, incorrectly said the dam was in the legislative district of Assembly member Lori Saldaña, D-San Diego. It is in San Diego County.

Several congressional versions of reform proposals would provide a government-backed alternative to private insurance. A Senate plan would allow states to decline to participate on behalf of their residents.

Perry, who has turned railing against the federal government into an art form, has cranked up the volume in recent months because a Democrat occupies the White House and because he is running for re-election against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

Both candidates are adamantly against the current legislation.

The governor calls the opt-out provision a "classic Washington bait-and-switch" because Texans’ income-tax dollars would be subsidizing the federal plan regardless of whether the state participated.

Let us not forget that Perry accepted federal stimulus funds this year to help the state balance its budget, yet he was sharply critical throughout the process. Think Br’er Rabbit pleading with Br’er Fox not to throw him in the briar patch. It is unclear whether the opt-out decision would be up to the governor or the Legislature.

The public option has generated outsized political heat. According to the Congressional Budget Office, only 2 percent of insured Americans would participate in a government-run option.

The state’s historically sparse approach to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has prevented it from maximizing its federal share of public health insurance dollars. That, along with other factors, has allowed Texas to lead the nation in the rate of uninsured residents — about 30 percent of adults under age 65, according to the Texas Medical Association.

As a result, the state potentially stands to gain the most from healthcare reform by lowering that rate and reducing the $1,800 surcharge each privately insured Texan pays annually in premiums to care for the uninsured.

Also, states opting out of the public option could put themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting and retaining companies.

To his credit, Perry has been aggressive about wooing new business to the state. He often uses money from the Texas Enterprise Fund to sweeten the pot for corporations considering major expansions or relocations.

On Oct. 29, Perry announced that the state will provide $2.5 million from the fund so Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. can expand its corporate operations in San Antonio, adding 750 jobs.

But funds aren’t available for smaller businesses looking to start up or relocate in Texas. Access to a public-option health insurance plan could make a huge difference in their decisions.

The governor is wise to hold his tongue and watch reform legislation unfold before weighing in.

It is a long way to the finish line.

Perspective is difficult — but absolutely necessary to understanding what happened and its implications.

The rush of information after 13 people were shot to death at the U.S. Army base was at once extensive, incomplete and occasionally wrong.

Military officials believe Maj. Nidal Hasan, a 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, fired a handgun in a center where about 300 soldiers were waiting to get vaccinations and eye tests as they prepared to deploy overseas.

A female police officer is credited with wounding Hasan, who was taken to an area hospital under custody.

Many details about his background emerged quickly: He was born in Arlington, Va., to Palestinians who moved to the U.S. from Israel. He grew up in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley and graduated from Virginia Tech University. He received a medical degree from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., and worked six years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A lifelong Muslim, he attended a mosque in Silver Spring, Md. He moved to Fort Hood in July.

But much is not publicly known yet, including his motive, partly because officials had not interviewed him. He was in a coma on Friday and on a ventilator, according to news reports. Investigators will have to determine whether his behavior had provided warning signs that he might engage in such mindless violence. And the public will want to know what would cause a military officer to fire on unarmed fellow soldiers.

A key point to remember is that even though authorities believe Hasan was the gunman, even if he is formally charged in the killings, he’s entitled to the presumption of innocence unless and until the government proves he’s guilty.

Some news outlets seem obsessed with Hasan’s religion. Some online commentators have seized the opportunity to spew hateful denunciations based on ignorant stereotypes.

But Hasan’s personal faith might have had nothing to do with his actions. The New York Times quoted his cousin as saying that Hasan dreaded his imminent deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan and that he was shaken by the horrors conveyed to him by patients who had been traumatized by war.

It could be months before important details are sorted out and become public. It took until October for the Army to release a report about Sgt. John M. Russell, who’s accused of killing five people at the Camp Liberty combat stress clinic in Baghdad in May. The 325-page report detailed how Russell’s fellow soldiers were worried about his behavior but procedures for dealing with him weren’t clear enough.

Military personnel and their families face enormous stresses. These are exacerbated by the long wars the nation has been involved in. The Army is trying to improve its suicide-prevention efforts. But officials must determine what more can be done to improve safety on military bases.

The public can help most by avoiding baseless speculation and instead offering support and thanks for those who serve and their families.

Despite the old ad campaign slogan, there is no such thing as an "Army of One." We’re all indebted, and the Army’s loss is a loss for all our nation.

Valuable and safe

Contrary to a recent letter in The Florida Times-Union, plastic bags and other common plastic wraps are made from a type of plastic known as polyethylene that does not require the use of softening agents, such as phthalates.

Polyethylene bags and wraps are considered valuable materials that are widely collected for recycling by many large grocers and retailers, such as Wal-Mart.

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Those eternal fears of all parents were brought to the surface recently when Somer Renee Thompson was killed in Orange Park.

In some neighborhoods, children aren't allowed outside alone, as if they are on house arrest.

Yet, as parents, you can't and shouldn't do everything for your child.

That balancing act is the subject of today's comments from members of our E-Mail Interactive Group. To join, send an e-mail to: carol.boone@jacksonville.com.

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The Florida Academy of Family Physicians represents 4,000 family physicians, residents in training and medical students.

Family physicians are the first line of defense in helping their patients quit smoking.

We've known for years that smoking is harmful, not only to the smokers' health, but it also negatively affects the health of the public. Family members, coworkers, friends or anyone else who comes in contact with the tobacco smoke can be adversely affected.

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It's pleasing to see, in the storm of commentary over Professor David Nutt's sacking as the government's chief drugs adviser, that everyone outside politics now recognises the importance of scientific evidence in devising laws. But a strange reasoning twitch has appeared, in the arguments of politicians and rightwing commentators. Science can tell us about the molecules, they say, about their effect on the body and the risks. But policy is separate: a matter for judgment calls on social and ethical issues. Only politicians, they say, can determine the correct way to send out a clear message to the public. It is not a matter for science.

This is wrong. Alongside research into the risks of drugs, lots of work has also been done on the deterrent impact of different laws, classifications and levels of enforcement. As every piece of research has its own imperfections (and nobody has yet conducted a randomised controlled trial on drugs policy) you can make your own mind up about whether you find the results compelling.

One strategy is to compare different countries. A World Health Organisation study from 2008, published in the academic journal PLOS Medicine, compared drug use and enforcement regimes around the world. It was clear: "Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones."

Alternatively, you can compare drug use between states within one country, if they have very different enforcement regimes, as when parts of the US liberalised their laws a few decades ago.

In 1976 Stuart and colleagues found that cannabis use in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was not affected by reductions in cannabis penalties, when compared with three neighbouring communities which kept penalties the same.

In 1981 Saveland & Bray looked at national drug use surveys from 1972 to 1977 and found cannabis use was higher in "decriminalised" states, before and after changes in the law. When they looked at rates of change, although cannabis use was increasing everywhere, the most rapid increase was in the states with the most severe penalties.

In the same year, Johnson and colleagues used survey data on high school use and found decriminalisation had no effect on attitudes or beliefs about drugs. These studies are old, but only because the liberalisations they rely on for data happened a long time ago.

Another line of evidence comes from "before and after" studies, when laws are changed. Cannabis use in the UK dropped after cannabis was moved from class B to class C. Prohibition of alcohol in the US from 1920 to 1933 is the most famous example: alcohol use fell dramatically when prohibition began, and the price of alcohol rose to 318% of its previous level. By 1929 this initial impact had begun to wear off and rapidly: alcohol consumption had risen to 70% of pre-prohibition levels, and was still rising when prohibition was repealed, and the price had fallen to 171% of pre-prohibition levels. This reversion to old patterns of use occurred despite escalating spending on enforcement, up 600% over the same period. There are many more examples.

This is not an unresearchable question. There are other factors at play in all of these studies, and if they are not sufficiently rigorous for the government, or a brief informal dip into the literature is not enough, (it shouldn't be) then they should commission more research: because it is a tenet of evidence-based policy that if you discover a gap, you commission work to fill it.

This work is important for one simple reason. If you wish to justify a policy that will plainly increase the harms associated with each individual act of drug use, by creating violent criminal gangs as distributors, driving the sale of contaminated black market drugs, blighting the careers of users caught by the police, criminalising three million people, and so on, then people will reasonably expect, as a trade-off, that you will also provide good quality evidence showing that your policy achieves its stated aim of reducing the overall numbers of people using drugs.

In the 60s, the Isle of Man recast itself as an offshore tax haven. How will the Manx 'nation' react now that status is under threat?

Of all the ways to think about the Isle of Man – tax haven, motorbike race course, former birching capital of western Europe – the most difficult for the outsider to grasp and accept is the description "nation". How big is the nation? Thirty-three miles long and a maximum of 13 miles wide. What language does the nation speak? Mainly scouse and Mancunian, mixed in with some Scots and Irish. Where does the nation shop? At Marks & Spencer, Thorntons, Boots, Tesco and Next. What does the nation watch? Strictly Come Dancing, Coronation Street, and (coming soon, for one night only) Ken Dodd at the Gaiety. What colour are the 80,000 nationals? Overwhelmingly white. And where do most of them come from? At the latest count, 51% were born elsewhere, mainly in the country 60 miles across the sea to the east. On a very fine day, you can see the Cumbrian mountains from the promenade at Douglas, the nation's capital.

The same promenade has a big war memorial packed with the names of men who died fighting in the British cause and boarding houses (most of them now converted into flats) with names such as Kenilworth, Cunard, Marlborough and Savoy. Outside one of the prom's few remaining hotels, a bronze figure sits on a bench. This is Sir Norman Wisdom, probably the nation's most famous settler, advertising to the passerby that he can come inside and eat Sir Norman's Cottage Pie in Sir Norman's Brasserie. (The real Sir Norman sits in a nursing home elsewhere on the island, a 94-year-old sufferer from dementia, unable to recognise himself in his own films.) The sheer, familiar Britishness of all this is what makes the idea of the Isle of Man's separate nationhood so hard to understand.

Differences can, of course, be established. The nation has its own flag, its own anthem, its own parliament, its own £5, £10 and £20 notes, and a language (expensively revived but rarely heard) different to English. It might even have its own national dish: chips, cheese and gravy. But often greater differences, assuming there is some kind of British norm, occur between the nations that make up the UK. Douglas is much more like Llandudno than, say, Llandudno is like Penzance. The Isle of Man's difference is not so much cultural or social as financial. It stems from a history of mainland neglect and beneficence that has left it outside the UK (and the EU) as that hard-to-understand legal entity, a crown dependency, with the well-known consequence that it can make its own laws and set its own tax rates. These are very low. Corporation tax is zero for most businesses and 10% for banks; income tax has a top rate of 18% and a cap on the total amount that means no individual, no matter how high his earnings, can pay more than £100,000 a year; there is no stamp duty, death duty, or tax on capital gains and inheritance.

As an economic strategy for the wellbeing of 80,000 people, it has until now been an outstanding success. In the mid-1980s, the island's per capita GDP was about half the UK figure; the most recent statistics, for 2007-08, show it at least a fifth more. "A mini Celtic tiger," is how someone described this progress to me, though unlike in Ireland the recession has still to happen; the estimate for economic growth in the current financial year is 2.5%, while house prices, to judge from estate agents' windows, aren't far behind those in the south-east of England. Then last month London delivered a blow that had been coming ever since Alistair Darling told a Commons select committee in the early days of the financial crash that the UK Treasury needed to take "a long hard look at the relationship with the Isle of Man, a tax haven sitting in the middle of the Irish Sea".

Darling's target was the agreement in which the two governments share the revenue from VAT and duties on gambling and alcohol, which in various forms and to various formulae has survived for hundreds of years. The details are arcane – you can spend half a day trying unsuccessfully to unravel them – but the upshot of the UK Treasury's long hard look will be a steep reduction in the Isle of Man's share from the pot. This year the agreement contributed £339m to the Manx government; it will shrink by at least £50m next year and by at least £100m in the years thereafter. Because the agreement has supplied 60% of the Manx government's revenue, the cuts present the island with the biggest crisis most people can remember, and also reveal a truth. The Isle of Man owes its excellent schools, hospitals, infrastructure, transport and generous welfare provision (the basic state pension, for example, is 50% higher than in the UK) to payments gathered mainly by HM Revenue and Customs. Enemies of tax havens such as the Tax Justice Network (TJN) describe the payments as a subsidy from the UK taxpayer, which will continue even after the cuts. Manx people hotly dispute that. But however you describe it, the fact, surely, is that the Isle of Man's lavish public spending has not come about by charging 0% corporation tax and setting an income tax cap on billionaires at £100,000 a year.

I went to see the chief minister, Tony Brown, known as "The Chief" or "Chiefy" to his staff, and the owner of a hardware store in Castletown – the island has many treats for the British nostalgist but one of the most pleasant is the sight of small shops selling useful things. We met in his wood-panelled government office, but it was easy to imagine him behind a counter, as a cheery figure selling electric irons and light bulbs and joshing customers in his Liverpool accent ("Manx scouse", he said). I wondered why his government was so shy of "tax haven" as a description (all the official literature makes a big point of denying it) when it was so obviously a place to go to avoid paying taxes. The quarrel seemed to be with what the phrase connoted – money laundering, opaque banking techniques, drugs money – when the Isle of Man had, as Brown said, "actively engaged with the international community" to tackle these problems and was now widely recognised to have a financial system at least as transparent as most of the big tax jurisdictions.

"Still, your attraction is that you have very low taxes."

"Very low? I wouldn't say very low. I'd say low – like the City of London has low rates compared to Europe."

This is a favourite island argument – the pot-calling-the-kettle-black rebuttal – in which the Isle of Man features as an easy scapegoat for much bigger sins committed elsewhere. And who can't see the merit in it? This week an index produced by the TJN, an organisation usually reviled among the Manx population, showed that the island was placed 24th out of 60 jurisdictions ranked for their lack of transparency in relationship to their volume of financial activity. The American state of Delaware came first, followed by Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the City of London, so what did those goody two-shoes, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, have to say about that?

Generally, inside and outside the chief minister's office, the feeling has grown that the UK is "picking on" the Manx. The minister for agriculture, fisheries and forests, Phil Gawne, told me that London mustn't go too far, otherwise a more militantly nationalist breed of politician may come to power in Douglas, and in unspecified ways make the relationship much more fraught. As Gawne went to jail as a young man for politically motivated arson, it can be assumed that he knows what he's talking about – but the irony is that he was protesting against incomers attracted by the same low tax rates that he sees now as his nation's salvation.

Neither are the cuts the only cause of resentment. The Manx government pays the UK a few million every year for defence and diplomatic representation abroad. It also pays the international rate in fees – £9,000 as opposed to £3,000 – for students at UK universities, while the NHS charges for any patients referred from the island for treatment in UK hospitals. Next year, however, the UK is ending its reciprocal healthcare arrangements, which means that Manx residents who fall ill or get injured in the UK will be charged as soon as they leave A&E and take up a bed in a ward. Another local newspaper, the Manx Independent, discovered that even for countries far beyond the EU – Moldova, Kyrgyzstan – similar bilateral agreements would remain untouched.

One feels sympathy. So much about the Isle of Man seems sympathetic to ordinary aspiration and, if you like, ordinary people. Unlike those snotty crown dependencies in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man is open to settlement by the poor as well as the rich (though workers need permits and must work for five years before entitlement to social security). But it's worth remembering how we reached this state. The Isle of Man has always set its own tax rates, even after the crown bought the rights to the island's revenues, though not the island itself, from the Duke of Atholl in 1765. Tax evasion in the form of smuggling was a staple of the island economy around this time, and then, after the steamships and tourists began to arrive in the 19th century, it largely disappeared as a way of making money. Tourism transformed the island, but it provided unsteady, seasonal employment – even in the postwar era Manx people migrated to East Anglia every autumn to crop sugar beet – and by 1960 the number of holidaymakers was shrinking year by year.

It was a UK governor, in the days before the UK surrendered its power, who identified the solution as low taxation. In 1960, Sir Ronald Garvey persuaded the island's parliament to abolish surtax at a time when marginal rates in the UK were rising. The aim was to attract a richer kind of islander, officially known as New Residents and unofficially still remembered as the "When-I's", as in "When I was in Mombasa," because so many were retired from imperial duties. They gave their bungalows African names and talked about "my accountant" at cocktail parties. North Country businessmen and a scattering of writers and celebrities also arrived: George MacDonald Fraser, Mollie Sugden, Ronnie Ronalde ("If I were a blackbird I'd whistle and sing"), and of course Norman Wisdom. Financial capitalism had still to be globalised; the idea that institutions could migrate as easily as people had to wait until new technology developed in the 1980s. But the idea that Isle of Man's economic future would be founded on people and businesses escaping UK income tax had London origins, and until the great crash happened London seemed perfectly content.

Gawne pointed out to me that although the island made most of its money from alchemical companies making money out of money, the government itself was left-of-centre in its commitment to public services and redistributive policies. It was important that the cuts and the rises in tax, which will certainly come, did not bear down upon the weak. Does it remind you of anywhere else?