Flying Aqua Badger

The End of Free Banking (Again)?

2011-12-18T21:51:00.003Z

The vague and lengthy declaration that retail and investment banks need to be split at some point in the distant future is going to be announced tomorrow. Desperate cries of horror from the banking lobby will follow as they always do. The most usual horror story designed to bring fear to the masses is the idea that free banking would become a thing of the past.

It's a good threat but one that will only be pulled out as a very last resort. Oddly enough, its coming about would be a sign of victory for the public. Banking most profitable asset is their customer's inertia; The infinite number of "you're more likely to change ... than your bank." There's a reason for that and that's not seeing the bank suck money out of your account. Should they start making it visible, customers will notice and all the efforts banks have been forced to make to smooth the process of transferring current account supplier will begin to haunt them.

The Electoral Smell of 2007

2011-12-18T00:14:00.002Z

There's something about the Conservatives recent showing in the polls which makes me think back to 2007 and wonder whether they are thinking whether it's the best time they are going to get to call an election considering the ever diminishing forecasts for the economy.

David Cameron's use of the veto seems to have persuaded the voters that he will stand up for our interests in Europe. They aren't used to that and have been calling for it for a long time. It's never been the most important issue so it's questionable how long this bounce for the Tories will last. In their favour it may bring back the UKIP supporters into the fold.

The Liberal Democrats look to be a shell of a party with their integrity shattered due to not voting against student fees rises. The taint still shows, over a year after the issue passed, indicating it won't go away this parliament and will weigh heavily on them in the next election.

Labour are suffering a real crisis of leadership. Ed Milliband was always a risky prospect. He has 3 factors affecting how he is perceived that he will not ever shift:

The support of the unions secured his victory
As a key member of Gordon Brown's team he is implicated with the creation of the economic mess
The "betrayal" of his brother David

Top that all off with having Ed Balls as his No.2 then you have an unelectable party whose leadership had far too much dealings with the problems in the economy. Now that the most prime ministerial candidate as next leader is invalidated, David Milliband being second best the first time around leaves too many open goals, there is a struggle to find a credible replacement.
If the best they can come up with is Yvette Cooper, her 18 months as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and simply referring to her as Mrs Balls introduces the same problem.

Still, it won't happen yet I feel. The all important constituency boundary changes is the vital advantage that the Conservatives need to remove doubt from the result. If the Labour leadership remains unchanged then October 2013 is the time to look for.

The Distractions of Europe

2011-12-12T23:39:00.003Z

There are some big moving pieces shaping life and thought in Britain today. Prime Minister David Cameron taking the nuclear option to the EU. The governments junior coalition partners poor reaction to it. Though no-one is surprised the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats disagree on Europe. The question is, as the gravitational mass of the Euro crisis increases, can the coalition sideline the issue and still work together?

Some are amazed that Cameron used the veto. It's a threat, you're not really supposed to use it. He couldn't sign a new treaty without an uncomfortable referendum and leaving a large chunk of his backbenchers furious. The public is mostly favourable that, finally, a British leader is willing to stand up to Europe. The protection of the City of London didn't seem the issue to me and if it was I am shocked that we'd otherwise so easily had over sovereignty regarding the national budget.

The EU summit, where the weapon was wielded, went on to produce another plan to fix the eurozone crisis. Sadly, it is there to fix the next crisis and does little if nothing to address the current problems. The politicians have been shielded by the central bankers move on November 30th to bring extra US dollar liquidity into the transatlantic financial system. It's only today that the effect has worn off and the markets have taken a big tumble again.

And as much fun as the geopolitics are, there is outright refusal to address the real problem. The financial system. Richard Koo rightly points out the absurdity of having near zero interest rates and instead of borrowing cheaply, paying down debt is the order of the day. We work to a fractional reserve banking system. That means money paid back is money destroyed. It has to be replaced with fresh borrowing to keep us treading water. And in order to grow it has to be replaced with greater borrowing than what is repaid.

We can't pay down debt and have growth unless existing wealth is put to work. If we're not going to fix this unoptimised system and won't accept a write down on debt then I only see one path to generating the growth that'll turn the economy around. The existing wealth of the elite and cash rich corporations needs to be put to use on new/small enterprise, where innovation will be most significant and the next major companies will be born from.

Teach our kids to code | John Graham-Cumming

2011-09-13T00:10:00.000+01:00

Teach our kids to code | John Graham-Cumming

Agree with John's sentiment entirely.

Program or be Programmed

2011-08-24T00:59:00.002+01:00

So goes the title of Douglas Rushkoff's book. Unless I missed a turn somewhere, the direction our world is going suggests programming will be a bigger part of our children's lives than it is our own. Jim Anning in his post Kids and Programming argues that we need change.

I left state schooling at the end last century but very little strikes me that things there have progressed as much as they should have. ICT wasn't a real subject them. Yes, the token room and single teacher but there was little more in it than creating basic files and organising folders. In fact the most advanced stuff was the 4 PCs in the graphics room which had Macromedia Fireworks on it.

In the same way that the British struggle with foreign languages it's all too easy to see programming languages following that path.

If we have to start somewhere then if Microsoft Office holds the programs of choice then at least the kids should be taught VBA which enhances it.

Biggest Strikes Since 1926 - Why?

2011-06-28T19:45:00.003+01:00

The unions have got themselves a bit carried away in their rhetoric of late. Talking up strike action to rival the General Strike of 1926 only prompts people like me to look up how successful that particular campaign was.

What was it about?
Miners workers pay and conditions.

What was the problem?
They were going to get paid less and work more.

Why?
The mining industry in this country was dying on its arse. The easy rich seams were depleted long ago. Extracting the remaining sources was getting increasingly expensive and foreign supplies were becoming ever cheaper.

Why did the strike get so big?
Largely out of sympathy strikes. Subsequently made illegal.

What was the result?
Take a look at our thriving industry now. There's no escaping the inevitable.

And moving on to the present. Lets spot the similarities:

What is it about?
Pensions, mostly.

What is the problem?
Well, they are going to get paid less (by contributing more to their pensions and getting less back than they thought) and work more (extra years per lifetime rather than hours per day).

Why?
Well, the demographics of supporting large pensions are dying on their arse. The days were there were 9 workers to support each pensioner are long gone. We're now looking at closer 3.

Why is the strike getting so big?
As our Chancellor likes to point out we're all in it together. It's a mutual cause that chimes with almost every union.

What will the result be?
Take a look at the private sector. What's unsustainable will not be sustained. Kick and scream about it by all means, but it won't change. Not without a great shift in the demographic layout of the country.

Greece - Will it Make it to the Long Grass?

2011-06-28T19:12:00.003+01:00

The Eurozone leaders are becoming increasingly desperate to see Greece's problems dismissed to the long term. Voluntarily extending maturity on loans by 30 years can only be an option taken by someone facing obliteration if they do not.

The usual answer to being unable to pay debt is default. It's painful, it's ugly but it's necessary. Ever increasing debt gets to the point where you are paying nothing but interest on that debt and never repaying the capital. Greece isn't there yet but with it's bond yield in double digits and its economy in recession that is the trajectory.

Far better to accept the consequence now. Restructure the loans and reform the economy. Greece will learn to balance it's budget as it struggles to find foreign funding for years to come. Spurious lenders get their hands burnt and learn to invest more wisely in future. Something to be said for a balanced portfolio. But at least everyone will know where we stand.

The uncertainty is stopping us for moving on after the world financial crisis.

The AV Referendum

2011-05-02T10:36:00.006+01:00

I just received the No Campaign Ltd mailshot. To summarise, it's position is the voting system should be simple, just like you.

"The winner should always be the one who comes first." Comparing electing a government to winning a race, match or bout is a terrible analogy.

Imagine the following election results under first-past-the-post:
BNP 18%
Conservative 17%
Greens 17%
Labour 16%
Liberal Democrats 16%
UKIP 16%

Under this system we have a BNP Member of Parliament with 18% of the vote. Congratulations.
The 82% majority that didn't vote for this candidate would mostly veto him/her if they could. But they can't, so tough. And they can't even register their opposition by putting him/her 6th or even leaving off entirely. Your preferences beyond your first choice are completely ignored.

The leaflet is quite vacuous.

The literal big picture (of Nick Clegg)
"The Lib Dems and Nick Clegg would always be part of the government." What a ridiculous statement. Clegg is going to be lucky to survive the next year in the government, let alone being an indefinite fixture.

The figures
"The alternative vote system could cost the country £250 million"

"£91 million on the referendum". Considering that money would be spent even if we stick with FPTP that's a bit of a non argument.

"£26 million explaining how people should vote under the new system". Less than £1 per voter. Money well spent. Though you would have thought that all the money we ploughed into education would have been enough. The only reason FPTP doesn't need explaining that every child is familiar with a pirate's treasure map and knows that X marks the spot.

"Up to £130 million on electronic vote counting machines". You know you're stretching the argument when you use "up to" because the item itself is discretionary.

And there's not even an "or" in the alternatives the money could provide. So the
2503 doctors,
6297 teachers,
8197 nurses,
35885 hip replacements,
69832 school places
could look very attractive to someone who must have the FPTP system because they are too ill witted to understand the alternative vote.

Lets not kid ourselves. AV is a miserably little compromise, to borrow a phrase, but that's no good reason to dismiss it because we aren't being offer proportional representation.

Getting proper political, the gap between this referendum and the last referendum in this country has a span encapsulating a 18 year Tory administration followed by a 13 year Labour one and a few years either side. If we say no to AV, how long do you think we'll get until one for PR comes along?

Youth Parliament and Tuition Fees

2011-01-04T17:39:00.002Z

Just watching the Youth Parliament debating the rise in tuition fees. This was held on 29th October 2010. Normally, they are pretty good at showing up their elders. Not this time, sadly. This issue is far too close for objectivity.

The supposedly intelligent members of the more egotistical nature (the ones that talk about themselves) think they can't go because of the debt. Repayment is based on ability to pay. The bailiff doesn't show up for non payment when you're out of work...

Bless them.

Vince Cable Doesn't Help Himself

2010-12-23T22:34:00.002Z

"Obviously one will have to be more guarded, but the problem is you need to give people an honest answer when they ask a question. Again it diminishes our role."

I don't understand the principle of telling a single constituent who asks the right question an honest answer but not the voting public at large. A coalition is expected to have its fractures. Putting on a brave face and brushing over them like they don't exist reeks of insincerity. We don't like it.

John Mann - "Crime Down 400%"

2010-12-16T12:25:00.003Z

On Daily Politics and Sky News I've heard Labour MP John Mann claim crime has gone down 400% in his constituency following changes in the way drug users are treated.

For the numerically curious like me, I'm wondering if the thieves are now putting back 3 times as much as they stole last time they visited their victims.

Student Fees in Scottish Universities

2010-12-16T11:26:00.003Z

By the sounds of it, what's going to happen is this:
Scottish students pay no fee
Northern Irish, Welsh and English students pay fees (rumoured to be up to £6000)
EU students pay no fee
Rest of the World students pay fees (non-capped, I believe)

What a bizarre situation. The EU ruling is that if you charge nothing at home you have to charge the same to EU students in other countries. Half-assed devolution works very well for Scotland here.

WikiLeaks - Fuss About Nothing?

2010-11-29T22:43:00.004Z

The Middle East and Korea have made the most interesting items.

I do love the way Iran are taking the latest release of US government files by WikiLeaks seeing it as nothing more than mind games actively authorised by the US State Department. No-one is battering an eyelid that Saudi Arabia doesn't fancy having another nuclear power its neighbourhood so no news there.

It wouldn't be surprising if North Korea has tested the patience of China by failing to do communism properly and haemorrhaging it's dissident population. So if it is true that China is no longer bothered about keeping it as a buffer state to the America-by-proxy South that would make out and out war much more likely.

The Liberal Democrats - 6 Months Into Government

2010-11-25T11:48:00.003Z

The good news for Lib Dems is that they are on the agenda and always being talked about. The bad news is that it's hard to find anyone with a good word to say about them. There is only one debate in town for them since the Browne report on higher education funding and student finance. The answer that the students need to pay more has not gone down well.

Pledge is a horrible word to fall victim to. And fallen they have. A pledge against raising tuition fees which all Lib Dem MPs agreed has been taken as a promise rather than a token of intent. They have failed to create a narrative which would stop this being seen as a broken promise. Abstaining isn't an answer as their pledge specifically states to vote against the rise in fees.

They are going to find this one very hard to get out of. During the lead up to the general election following the first prime ministerial debate the Lib Dems polled comfortably in the mid 20's. Now it is as if the surge never happened. It looks as though they have sacrificed the party for the sake of one term of government stability and a taste of power.

Will they change tact before the next election? They will increasingly find that power sharing does nothing for their aspiration to win an overall majority government in the perceivable future if they are continually forced to renege on their principles.

Their best chance of survival will come from getting everything they need out of the coalition done as early as possible. I'm thinking no longer than 18 months. Most importantly the electoral reforms which Nick Clegg was smart enough to grab responsibility for in his role as deputy. Alternative Vote and evening out constituency boundaries will do make seats easier for them to win. They will also need to get through legislation supporting a couple of their key policies. If they don't then they will have a more favourable voting system but no integrity on which to capitalise on it.

Honeymoon is over, time to get real. Look for the signs by this time next year.

The State of Student Fees

2010-11-25T10:03:00.005Z

The problem seems to be a lack of understanding in finance and demographics. This is understandable as the cost/benefit analysis of the graduated workforce is complex. There are two parties which are deemed to benefit from students qualifying at universities:

The recipient of the degree
Beneficiaries of the services that they have been educated to provide

Ask a potential student who should pay and I've yet to find one that says they should. Other taxpayers have a mixed view that goes the entire specrum of their contribution from 0% - 100%.

Ministers are busy looking to a fair answer to the questions "who should pay?" and "how should it be paid?". As always, the use of the word fair is devisive and used intentionally to obfuscate as fairness is a constant aspiration but rarely pragmatic or even possible.

Of the two parties, the recipient is the easiest to analyse. Evidence should be gathered on how much financially the person gains compared to non-graduates. Halve that then devise a payment method on the sum in such a way as to not prove as a disincentive for going to university.

In some respects all the debate over student fees does little but to add weight to the graduate tax. For example the medical student on Young Voters' Question Time was using the figure of £81,000 for his argument. He was able to do that as Top-up fees and student loans result in an absolute total.
A graduate tax wouldn't lead to a grand debt which must be paid off. So instead of a potential student deciding whether or not to go to university based on a daunting lump some figure, they can do so on a small percentage, 0.5% or 1% of their income.

How Did I Miss Andy Burnham Advocating LVT?

2010-11-06T21:47:00.002Z

Show's how disinterested I must have been with the Labour leadership contest a couple of months back. Turns out Andy Burnham wanted to get radical with introducing LVT. The man has just got way up in my estimates.

Maybe next time.

Guardian article:

Child Benefit Cut - It's 3 Years Away But My Word Are Folk Angry

2010-10-04T21:08:00.005+01:00

There are 2 words that describe the cut of Child Benefits for households with a higher rate income tax payer from 2013 and it depends which side of the argument you are on.
If you're for it then "simple". If you're against it then "crude".

This is because it hits single earner households when dual earning households could bring in a lot more money between them and still receive Child Benefit. If you trust government IT systems then crude is appropriate. How much harder is it to track the total earnings of a household compared to tracking a higher rate taxpayer and blacklisting their house?

I can't tell which it is. It could be that the Chancellor knows that this system is the most practical to implement so the savings aren't eaten up by IT costs. Alternatively, because the perceived unfairness is so obvious, it could be a great rouse to cut Child Benefits for households bringing in more than the higher rate income tax threshold further down the line.

Of course, because it is 3 years down the line, a ludicrous amount of time, it may not even come to pass.

The thing about this benefit is that anyone affected by its absence is not going to justify a sob story. Its not going to take food off the table or mean the heating can't go on in the winter. It's going to mean less money in the trust fund, a downgrade in the family holiday or having to give up the weekend pony rides. Also, 3 years is a bloody long time to prepare for it so no-one can say they weren't given fair notice.

Sleep well, Hanni

2010-08-29T23:06:00.004+01:00

It's reached the end of a day I'd rather not have happened. Ignoring the 5am bladder call (if I can't make it through the night undisturbed in my late 20's I hate to think what's in store for me in my 60's) my morning opened with a text from my mum saying our cat Hannibal was not well. Within 3 hours I crying in the car on the way out of the vets with the carry basket on my lap with the weight of my dear pet that had breathed its last minutes before.

He was only 13 years old. He died weak with a failing liver and dehydration, but I was assured in very little pain. It had only been five months since I moved out of the flat which my mum took over to look after our three moggies. I feel most sorry for her. The arrangement was intended for her to have her companions back for their elder life though I expected she'd have a good couple of years before she had to shed any tears for them.

Hanni was a lovely, loyal animal. He'd visit me at the desk to see what I was up to and bop the screen where the cursor moved. There was very little chance of watching TV on the sofa without him digging his claws in trying to make a comfy spot. First task after getting home from a day at work would be to change trousers to slacks which could afford the snags. And at night he'd watch over me from the bench next to the bed before clambering over my head to go settle himself down somewhere around my feet.

No doubt mum and I will continue to tell his story wherever opportunity presents itself. He will always be remembered as the young cat with crazy perseverance. As a 2-3 year old, insisting that the 2"x 3" banister post was the best place to get a good night's rest, he scrabbled his way up there every night but for weeks on end. Bedtime would be punctuated each evening with a thud, thud, thud, thud, thud of increasing tempo as Hanni dropped off and, well, dropped off down the staircase. Each episode was repeated half a dozen times or more before he realised the futility of his endeavours.

I'm going to miss him.

Facebook - Why the break?

2010-06-23T21:29:00.004+01:00

I caught myself the other day logging into Facebook for the first time in weeks. Along with thousands if not millions of others, I'm fairly concerned about the company's attitude towards their users privacy of late.

Matthew Stibbe of BadLanguage summarises the point beautifully in his post Word bloat and privacy policies. Why does it take 5830 words for Facebook to say what Flickr says in 384? Unless of course, they are very, very different.

Ultimately Facebook is a fad. It's stronger than MySpace ever was, before it was forced to retreat into it's niche of up and coming indie music, but will someday be overtaken by a new upstart that doesn't face the same restrictions on will see portions of it's market share move to various other quarters.

Think that won't happen? Then I'll ask you this question: Do you Yahoo!?

What's a struggle right now is the alternative to Facebook. Twitter is great for thoughts and status updates. Flickr great on pictures. LinkedIn does business contacts but nothing really competes in the same place as Facebook at the moment.

The weeks may drift by and I'll either go back to daily use or forget to use it entirely again. I'll be looking out for alternatives none the less. I'm doubtful Facebook can pull it back.

The Budget and the Wing Men

2010-06-22T18:09:00.003+01:00

Stoney cold faces of Lib Dem seniors Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander flank the Chancellor George Osborne as he delivers his first budget. Nothing quite like unity, ay.

The good news for my team is that it gives us 6 months to plan for the 2.5% increase compared to the few weeks we got for the 2.5% decrease in 2008.

Next, some stability please.

Away One Week and the Coalition Hits Scandal Already

2010-05-30T21:38:00.002+01:00

Having just returned from a weeks holiday in the Mediteranean and being totally cut off from the internet, 24 hour news and news in general, I expected the BA strikes to be headline. My flight got cancelled so I was moved onto an earlier one so lost my day in Barcelona (grrr) but my missus got her little boy back a day earlier (ahhh). So on balance I'd let BA off if it wasn't for the Titan Airways pilot, performing the stand-in service, finding every bit of turbulence in UK airspace.

Instead, I pick up the paper and read a headline that feels a year out of date: another damned, bloody expenses scandal. David Laws resigned, thankfully, showing the dignity fitting of a Minister (something which became rarer and rarer with the Labour administration). But what the hell was he thinking. Rightly or wrongly, sexual improprietry brings about more government resignations than results of their competence.

First rule of putting yourself up as a candidate for parliament in the 2010 was thus:
Are you comfortable with your sexuality?

Three or four elections ago I could understand it, but there's no need for public figures to stay in the closet this day and age. And if you do, don't leave a breadcrumb trail with public money.

Irritating, that's all I can sum it up as.

Icelandic Ash Returns

2010-05-16T17:55:00.002+01:00

The ash returned to the UK this weekend with a number of airports being shut down and no-fly zone restrictions over the airspace being imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority. I have lots of vested interest this time with 3 flights including family and myself scheduled this week.

Nothing can be done in the short term but hold tight. However, in the long term picture, where the frighteners have been put out by saying this volcanic disruption could last 20 years there is this strange quote in this BBC article from aviation expert, David Learmount:

"This could go on for 20 years or more. We just don't know how long this volcano is going to erupt for. Technologically there's nothing we can do about this. We cannot build engines and aircraft which can fly safely through volcanic ash, it's just out of the question. The only thing that we can do is get better at predicting precisely where every part of the volcanic ash cloud is."

So with all our technological prowess there's no chance at all that we can disperse or filter dirty air before the engine sucks it up? No way at all? In 20 years? I find that incredibly hard to believe.

Lets just say, where there's a profit, there's a way.

Where Geeky Politics Gets You

2010-05-11T19:37:00.001+01:00

Doing the rounds on Twitter:

FPTP error 404: Government not found. Please reset your voting system to
proportional representation and try again

So, a Hung Parliament

2010-05-09T18:41:00.003+01:00

I don't know why, but the Liberal Democrats went Ross Perot on us be largely failing to make the gains their exposure in the Leaders' Debates promised. As such the bizarreness of the first past the post system reared its head as the Lib Dems gained as extra 1% of the vote share in a House of Commons which has 4 more MPs than the last and still conspired to lose 5 seats.

Hopes of having 100 seats were dashed and we now have the bizarre permutation where the Tories don't have a majority (306 seats) but Labour (258) and the Lib Dems (57) couldn't combine to make a majority coalition either, at least without nationalist help.

Thus a Lib/Con coalition is the only combination that will give us a strong government for this parliament. Of course, this strength is questionable with the compromises that must be made in order to satisfy both parties.

My struggle is working out which outcome is best from here.
Lib/Con coalition
Lib/Con pact
Lib/Lab conglomerate
Con minority

Lib/Con coalition
This is the only option that will give a stable government for the 4/5 years. I can't say I'm a fan of this combination mainly because this government would execute the cuts needed and the public won't thank them for it. The Liberal Democrat brand would be contaminated by this association and we would again resume the Red/Blue power struggle. Having some governing experience may do some good for the Lib Dems and make the voters more friendly towards them but that's a big gamble.

Lib/Con pact
This is where a deal is made in the next few days for a programme that will last no longer than a year as the Conservatives back some of the Lib Dems minor bills and the Lib Dems abstain from Conservative bills they disapprove of, rather than vote against. If the Lib Dems had any sense, they'd get hold of the Treasury books and make a big attempt at getting the full picture and making very specific plans for the economy ready for the next general election in 5-12 months time.

Lib/Lab conglomerate
A lot of parties will need to pull together to make this work. The price to be paid to appease the nationalists is that England takes the biggest hit on service cuts/tax rises. It would be hard to see this last a full term, just like a Lib/Con pact. The appeal for this is again, the Lib Dems can take a look at the books and as Labour took us into this mess they will receive near the entirety of the blame for subsequent austerity measures.

Con minority
Should this eventuality occur, things get really unpredictable in the short term. Would the Finance Bill on the back of the emergency budget pass? Would its failure result in a fresh election in July/August? With the Tories effectively giving the public a budget to vote would they win or lose?

There's something about the Con minority government which makes me think we'll reach a conclusion to the economic situation sooner. Another election this year with a bit more information to hand would suit me fine.

Election Night (2) - Polling Stations

2010-05-06T23:50:00.002+01:00

There's a big deal being made of the number of polling stations where there's still a queue outside after 10pm. Leeds and Ealing in particular, have been pointed out with camera queues. There's also an issue with people not being allowed to vote, all told.

The good news for Preciding Officers is that the procedure is very, very simple. Doors shut at 10pm. No ballot paper at 10pm, no vote. http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0009/55836/UKPGE-PSH-web-FINAL.pdf

As with any queuing activity (to which, us Brits are very accustomed), we know if you join a queue late, chances are you won't get through the door before closing time.

The factors raised so far are:

Not enough ballot papers
Outdated polling lists
Latecomers to queues
Inefficient handing out of ballot papers
Showing up without polling card

Latecomers only have themselves to blame. The stations are open for 15 hours, leaving it until 9pm to show up naturally more dangerous than showing up at 8am. Showing up without your polling card is socially irresponsible. Not doing your bit, as it were, to keep the process efficient.

Not enough ballot papers and outdated polling lists are disgraceful reasons to deny people their right to vote. There is plenty of time between the electoral roll cut off date and election day. Time enough to get a list together. Same for ballot papers. Each station knows exactly how many people to expect and should have a threshold of spare ballot papers beside. Turnouts of 100% do not happen so there is no excuse for not having enough ballot papers.

Election Night (1)

2010-05-06T23:11:00.006+01:00

5 years ago, I started this blog. Without looking at the archive I have two memories of the time: Liverpool in the epic European Cup final and voting Labour, then going home to wash my hands.

I didn't like the negative campaign the Tories were running at the time and I don't like the negative campaign Labour are running this time.

Oddly enough, TV had a larger part to play in the 2005 election as it was Tony Blair's appearence on what I believe was Question Time or it might have been Newsnight where he had a set piece with an audience. Not on its own, but that played a part in swaying my vote.

This year I found it much easier to vote. My mind was made up before the election was called and centred on two issues:
Land Value Taxation
Making the British public believe there is an alternative to Red and Blue

On both counts that makes Lib Dems the clear choice. I'd like to see them do well. Realism means they can't be expected to get an overall majority. With that in mind, I've come to these idealistic and realist figures which I'd like to see as an overall result:

Conservative 326
Labour 185
Liberal Democrats 100
Others 39

You could be forgiven for thinking that I'd be in favour of a hung parliament. Ordinarily I would but that leaves the possibility of Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister. That's a result I could not stomach. This is the safest, restrictive option under the circumstances.

What's Labour Got in Common with Elvis?

2010-04-26T18:28:00.001+01:00

Charlotte Gore puts it very well:

Yesterday’s frankly cringeworthy Elvis stunt (their Elvis impersonator sang, “A little less conversation, A little more action please” without any hint of irony) may prove to be surprisingly apt:
Labour, it seems, is going to die sat on a toilet with its pants round its ankles, blowing a blood vessel trying to poo out a stubborn, rock like turd that’s been lodged up their colon for the last few years: Gordon Brown.

Soaring House Prices = Good News According to Sunday Express

2010-04-25T17:10:00.002+01:00

You know a paper is full of the brown stuff when you get a headline like "House Prices Soar by 10%: Latest figures reveals good news across UK."If you didn't know anyway.

Never mind the fact that house prices are still way over the odds of what is affordable. Couldn't help but mutter unpleasantries when I saw it at the newsagent.

Labour Budget 2010

2010-03-24T22:24:00.003Z

What happened with today's budget? Well, in short not much.

3 months of better than expected income/expenditure have given the chancellor £11bn to play with that he didn't think he had. The shame his he still doesn't have it. All that's happened is instead of running a deficit for the financial year of £178bn (and that was revised up in December from £175bn) it's expected to be in the region of £167bn.

The fact that as late as December the borrowing figure was revised up tells you how entirely incompetent the Treasury is with forecasting.

There's something very strange in the reporting of finance in this supposed recovery. The basic premise being it doesn't matter if you lose money, so long as you're not losing as much as you did last year. The analogy for this is me going to a wholesaler, buying stock for £100 and selling it for £50 in 2008/09 then buying the same stock at the same price the following year and selling it for £90 in 2009/10.

Does that sound good? No, of course not. Yet, that is what we are expected to celebrate. Over the term of the entire next parliament, no party believes they will get us on a balanced budget in any of the financial years.

Heightened personal borrowing kept us out of recession in 1999/2000 when we were last due to enter one. That is less likely to save us in 2017/2018 when the next one is due. That means we'll get one, possibly two years to dig into our huge debt. When I say huge, the Treasury forecast will make it £1,406bn. If we're very lucky we'll get to pay back £50bn on the capital before we're in the annual red again.

If this is the best thing Labour can say about themselves and their performance that'll make us vote for them again then no wonder we're looking at a change of administration.

University Challenged

2010-03-21T20:06:00.002Z

This comment in response to Minette Marrin's article on the failure of the Labour's education policies by James Young in the Times today really chimed to me so I thought it was worthy of repeating.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Brown's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Brown's plan".
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A...

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

No More Tax Rises Confirms Treasury

2010-03-11T17:31:00.002Z

Treasury Minister Liam Byrne confirmed on today's Daily Politics that Labour can bring down the deficit in 4 years with no more tax increases than those already announced on the Pre-Budget Report.

This means that VAT will not be going up to 20%, as widely speculated, under Labour.

Or at least that was the case up until about 18 minutes into the programme where he says that some taxes will have to go up.

Clear as mud as always.

Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain

2010-02-16T20:00:00.004Z

Just saw the last episode of the 2007 series, broadcast in May-June of that year. Can't help but think the upbeat ending on accumulated wealth would be a fair bit different if it was made 6 months later.

Good to see a recap of the New Labour ambition of a "new" Britain. Exactly in the same vein as the Tory's current fix "broken society", only with a naiver audience to thrust it upon. Also a younger Peter Mandelson's declaration that he wishes to control the media after they have been giving Labour such a hard time for years...

Barclays Profits

2010-02-16T19:19:00.003Z

Chris Dillow writes an interesting take on Barclays profit figures for the past year, something in the region of £11.46bn. Pitting the measure of profits against its assets. Whilst a little crude, I take his point which he best summed up in the later comment:

"I don't think it's wrong, therefore, to look at total assets. After all, if a firm isn't using these to make money, why does it have them?"

MPs Expenses - Scratchcard Economics

2010-02-05T00:44:00.003Z

From BBCLauraK on twitter:

Legg report cost more than taxpayer will get back from MP s who are repaying-cost 1.16m, demands for cash back are 1.12m

So the important thing is that we had fun while performing the activity.

Gunning for Bercow

2010-02-03T17:57:00.003Z

Just watching Prime Minister's Questions. In case anyone has forgotten the point of this weekly exercise, it is the short time MPs get to bring the PM and his/her government to account. The Speaker is the only person in the House that can interrupt proceedings and therefore the only person who can make the Prime Minister answer the question being asked.

This is the only thing that the public care about the speaker doing. In answer to David Cameron's last question asking why Gordon Brown is now advancing the alternative vote system the PM is rambling on irrelevantly about Tories and the hereditary principle. The Opposition benches are naturally raucous as the Prime Minister is completely out of line. The Speaker steps up to, quite rightly, tell the Conservatives to shut up so the PM can be heard.

What he should have done was tell the PM to answer the question asked while he was at it. PMQs is not a monologue. Bercow has failed already on what he needs to do. He has a few weeks to improve. And I hope he does or he should lose his seat to Nigel Farage of UKIP.

Welcome the iPad

2010-01-31T11:48:00.004Z

Apple's new device may not be a surprise but on the basis of technical innovation it is very welcome. From what I've seen we're looking at a luxury good with entertainment at its heart and business use on the back-burner. 3rd parties may come in to fill the gaps. That said, Apple is renowned for vendor lock-in despite have one of the most evangelistic customer bases.

Its objectives:
Browsing
Email
Photos
Video
Music
Games
eBooks

In its infancy I see this as a toy for the well off. This first version is a little repressed, most likely in an attempt to avoid cannibalising the iPhone. For example it doesn't have out of the box call making functionality, despite being equipped with microphone and speakers. I haven't found anyone with a good reason as to why it doesn't have a camera, apart from the obvious unwieldy size of the device. The back lit LCD screen puts a question mark over whether it will be a Kindle killer.

The first impression when I looked at it was "where's that going to go?" Laptops are delicate enough. I'm precious over the screen on my G1 phone. How do I keep this in use, yet out of harms way? Try keeping the kid's filthy mitts off something as cool, flashy and responsive as that. Rules out the coffee table.

I guess I'm more excited by its Star Trekkie nature. I can see it as the stepping stone to changing the way computer devices are moving. Not enough in it for me to cough up the dough but great progress none the less.

Interest Rates: Lower for Longer

2010-01-31T11:16:00.003Z

This is the line being peddled by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne and largely agreed with by the Bank of England and the treasury. As such there appears to be no opposition to the idea, certainly in the mainstream media. The nearest I've heard is referring to the current base rates as artificially low.

If the line was on inflation I'd understand. I can only presume the consensus is to keep quiet on inflation to allow it to eat away the absolute debt while paying little for it with a populist approach to the "home-owning" democracy how are now seeing £100's of pounds each month stay in their pocket that would normally be going to the mortgage lender.

Basic economics dictates that interest rates must not be lower than inflation. If it is then there is no incentive to lend. Criticising institutions for their poor lending record in such conditions is an untenable position.

The ambition has to be to return interest rates to a normal 3-5%. That's when the economy will start being able to take care of itself.

Exciting Week

2010-01-27T00:07:00.003Z

Picking up the paper for the train ride this morning I felt bizarrely excited about the items showing up for this week's news. Big headline was the expectation that the UK would exit recession. The headline for Wednesday morning is the UK "limps" out of recession. 0.1% growth was all we could muster for the initial figure. "Springs" would be better but we'll take what we can get.

Next up is the new Apple iThingamajig. I like the fact that Apple exists as a company bringing bright new shiny gadgets that their customers eagerly anticipate. I've never been one of its customers but I look forward to being wowed tomorrow by what they come up with. Chances are it will be a touch screen tablet. Who knows, it might be the one that turns me.

Lastly, Tony Blair shows up at the Chilcot inquiry. At the moment the evidence is being forced to speak for itself as the questioners aren't exactly nano-probing. However, I do welcome the opportunity for Blair to be scrutinised by a force more reckoning than Fern Britton.

Balls, Brown and Darling - 3 into 2 won't go

2010-01-19T22:04:00.003Z

Without a mandate, Gordon Brown was incapable of sacking Alistair Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer. With a mandate from the British electorate, Ed Balls is going to be calling on his master's door demanding his reward for years of loyal service.

The wrong question is being asked when the pollsters come out with

Who do you trust most to run the economy?
Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling
David Cameron and George Osborne
Nick Clegg and Vince Cable

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling would be lucky to see out 2010 as a combination. Balls will be Brown's number two at the soonest possible opportunity.

What that means is that arguably Labour's post asset is not worth listening to because he will not get the chance to implement any plan he devises (if he ever gets around to making one).

Election Coming Up - Where to Begin?

2010-01-18T22:28:00.002Z

Liberal Democrats -
PRO: Great policy (income tax to start at £10k)
CON: Very poor at selling it

Labour -
PRO: ...thinking... well given enough time they could come up with something like the minimum wage and freedom of information
CON: 13 years of failed promises leaving them now completely reactionary with no strategy and an unelectable leader. Oh and bankrupting the country in the process.

Conservatives -
PRO: Not Labour
CON: Subject to mild fits of stupidity like Shadow Chancellors on yachts, air brushing photos and forgetting to tell Chris Grayling which side the General picked

I can't help but think that the media outlets want mediocrity with their coverage of the Lib Dems. At this late juncture a grass root uprising of a new, seriously supported party emerging before the election is improbable. Which means ridiculing of the "they can't possibly win" kind means we're stuck with either Labour or Tories. How they can claim a love of democracy and yet favour a two party system I do not know.

Labour should have imploded by now. You have to give them credit for keeping the polls as tight as they have. As I've said before, it's nothing personal, but this party needs to pushed into 3rd place for the good of the nation. If the Conservatives and Lib Dems fail to make that happen then we've still got trouble 5 years down the line.

Anyone expecting the Tories to do radical good in power from 2010 to 2015 is going to be disappointed. The Labour Party will have managed to shake off most of the New Labour shackles and the dead weight associated with it. Another Labour or Conservative choice in 2015 is not something I'd look forward to.

Airport Security Steps Up - Who Looks Guilty?

2010-01-05T23:49:00.003Z

The BBC See Also blog is using an image from Associated Press for its post on increased security measures to come into effect as soon as the equipment can get in position.

"Hands up!", "Reach for the sky, punk!", "Put your hands in the air, now!"

That's what the image conveys. "Can you please look guilty so we can get about proving you innocent, please sir?.

You don't find me talking up civil liberties often. Being a Land Value Tax advocate I have to explain why I'm in favour of a new tax. The explanation is that it is a replacement tax, to offset income tax in particular. I always make a point of stating that income tax didn't always exist. When it did start it was small, incurred by a small number of citizens.

I couldn't help but notice the similarity; the creep in income tax to affect more and more workers and the creep that is going on in with ever more stringent airport security. Without eliminating the cause we are looking at welcoming in blood scans and brain scans in order to board a plane.

Sounds crazy doesn't it? Ordinarily I'd agree. But all we're getting in the mainstream media as a response is "It won't work. It's a waste of money." There was one item highlighted; the creation of a indecent image of a child. That's what we have to save us from this mockery of defence, it may violate child protection laws.

Along with CCTV, it'll become increasingly more pervasive under the guise that it's for our own protection like it is inevitable.

Good Old Snow

2010-01-05T20:32:00.002Z

It is of course entirely coincidental that, as Copenhagen 2009 in condemned to the history books as a pitiful failure where national interest supersedes the want to preserve the planet, we are in for some nasty winter weather.

Some of the more glamorous forecasts are saying we're in for 10 inches of snow. Rather like penis sizes, these estimates are subject to gross exaggeration. I'd welcome being proven wrong but 10cm is far more likely.

Election TV Debate Gets the Go-Ahead

2009-12-21T18:40:00.002Z

Good news today. There will be three debates broadcast during the election campaign. featuring the three main party leaders. One on ITV, another on Sky and the last on the BBC.

It will be interesting to see Gordon Brown continue to simplify political leadership into redundancy. His quote lifted off the BBC in relation to the story:

"Choices like whether we lock in the recovery or whether we choke it off; whether we protect the NHS, schools and police or whether we put them at risk to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy few."

If the choices really were as simple as this vs that then we wouldn't need ministers to make that decision since the choice would be so obvious. That mentality explains why he thinks its a good idea to print more money and have no inadvertent consequences. Ignoring a primary rule of economics which is that more money chasing the same amount of goods increases prices.

We can rephrase his first set of choices ("lock in the recovery or whether we choke it off") as:
The choice is to have more money in the system or stick with the same and hope things work out.

Soundbites may never die out again but that just means we need to ridicule them harder.

"Efficiency Savings"

2009-12-07T16:50:00.003Z

"Efficiency savings". I'm surprised I haven't seen journalists and news presenters raise their hands up and make quote marks in the air when they are interviewing MPs over them. It isn't that we don't believe that the public sector has become incredibly fat and bloated. It's just that we don't believe they will be found without performance issues.

After 12 years it is not viable for the government to find them. Doing so is an admission that they have been consciously careless with our money up until the point they were forced into changing tact.

The opposition parties need to be specific to be believable without leading to fear. That figure has to lead up to the £80bn-£90bn structural deficit too. Anything short of that isn't going to cut it with the public.

We don't expect everything to be quick wins like trident, ID cards, NHS IT systems. It should be a proper examination of the processes and productivity within each organisation. And it should have been, and continue to be, ongoing. Just like it is in the private sector.

Land Value Tax gets a Question Time mention

2009-12-04T10:41:00.003Z

Absolutely delighted to see that Clive Anderson brought up the notion of Land Value Tax when the Lib Dem's "mansion tax" was brought up on Question Time last night due to the presence of Vince Cable.

He's spot on with the problem of the "mansion tax" which is that it has a starting level. Any kind of threshold with rate jumps forces prices in unnatural directions. In the case of the proposed tax it would be downwards of £2m. Suddenly they'd be worth £1.995m.

Much better a lower flat rate with a starting valuation value of £0. Also to move away from property, which shouldn't be taxed, and onto land value which should.

Now Harman's at it

2009-12-03T11:40:00.002Z

Apparently the G20 and the G20 Plus are the same thing. At least that is what Harriet Harman has just come out with at Business Questions, defending the Prime Minister in his statement at PMQs yesterday where he included Spain as part of the G20.

Absolutely Deplorable - PMQs

2009-12-02T12:14:00.003Z

Gordon Brown's performance at PMQs as usual. David Cameron for once asks a direct question that demands a boolean answer on inheritance tax policy which the Prime Minister is so keen at ridiculing the Tories for.

That policy being that the current government have legislation lined up to increase the inheritance threshold. If they are so against the Tories doing anything with it then the government should scrap their plan (stolen from the Conservatives in the first place) immediately.

When asked will the government do that, the PM goes nowhere near an answer. Disgraceful, in the highest magnitude. This is what makes politics about personalities. The British public should not accept this type of behaviour when parliament is calling the government to account. It is an affront to democracy and should not be permitted to continue. This is exactly why Gordon Brown makes Labour unelectable.

Daytime Television Tension

2009-12-02T09:43:00.002Z

It's December so, naturally, I'm using up the last of my annual leave. That means the option of getting infuriated by daytime TV presents itself.

First up, Rip Off Britain. Good public service television. However, it takes about two seconds to work out that the programme should be called British Shoppers are Idiots. Rip-offs occur where there are essential goods at extortionate prices and no competition.

So covering store cards and going oh, they're so unfair is a nonsense. Don't like 30% APR? Then don't get one. It is incredibly simple. Gap insurance and extended warranties? Don't like the price, you don't need them. Or shopping around will bring the price down.

Don't mollycoddle public ignorance, making them think its not there fault they're paying over the odds when they it is entirely their choice. Corporations have their faults, there's no getting away from that, but the sooner we take some individual responsibility for our own money the less problems we'll have.

Is having less MPs really the answer?

2009-11-28T12:33:00.002Z

The fallout from the revelation of MPs expenses has been the call for smaller parliament. It takes 435 Representatives to run the House in the USA. This does make the 646 MPs in the UK look insanely large.

The current governing party holds 350 of those seats. They hold a rather thin majority and the backbenches are filling up with exhausted ex-ministers how have either resigned or been managed out by the Prime Minister in reshuffles. With around 100 Members of either democratically elected Commons or the hereditary/friends of the PM Lords needed to make a government, the pool of talent is shallow even with a change of administration.

The every stretching arm of government is now an arms race and isn't going to be easy to rationalise. The Spectator published a post yesterday that states that David Cameron's rhetoric may not have meaning because of the amount of shadow cabinet it would upset if it turns out they aren't going to walk into a job in government should the Tories win the general election next year.

If small government is what the Conservatives want then they need to commit to it now and implement early. The answer that came to me was to use a policy of natural wastage if reassembling Whitehall and upsetting some loyalist MPs is too much for a start out administration. The problem with that is it gives out a message of weakness and dithering.

So the only way is to be bold and do it early or change tact. If a few shadow cabinet members have to wait before they get a post then they should bear in mind that it won't take long for their colleagues to mess up and Cameron can take comfort that he has a pool of replacements to choose from.

Mobiles and Cars Don't Mix

2009-11-14T17:45:00.002Z

Whilst it may be legal to swan around in your car (at least in the USA) with your mobile phone to your ear, that doesn't make it a good idea... Waste of a Bugatti

Source: BBC

Just for fun - Barcodes

2009-11-13T14:59:00.003Z

I caught this rolling off Information Aesthetics and thought it worthy of note.
An example of the possible ways of livening up that old stable, the barcode from www.barcoderevolution.com.

More ACMD Advisors Resign

2009-11-10T21:25:00.002Z

The trouble in the Home Office may have gone away for a week after Alan Johnson sacked Professor David Nutt but it's back again.

Three more advisers have joined Marion Walker and Dr Les King, who left the day following Professor Nutt's sacking (I nearly wrote that last part with a straight face).

There can't be much more than the Home Office can do wrong during this administration.
They haven't got the "faintest idea" how many illegal immigrants there are residing in the country.
Foreign criminals get released into the public when they should be deported.
The employ illegal immigrants as cleaners.
Murderers walk out of open prison.

Now it is in the midst of losing the support and cooperation of the scientific community. It must have something else to slip in before the Election...

Britain's Bust - What about the Labour Party?

2009-11-10T20:03:00.003Z

Charlotte Gore has written a thought provoking post on Labour's Money Situation. The main premise being that if you want to see how a party will run a government then it is best to look at how a party runs itself.

You won't be surprised to learn that their debt when put to scale would match the situation of the country quite aptly. This isn't a new issue. Type Labour Party Funding into Google and you'll be presented with an article from 2002 in the Guardian saying they are £6m in the hole. The big cause then was that they pumped a load of money into a General Election they were guaranteed to win in 2001 because the Tories were still as unelectable as they were in 1997.

So Labour spend the future to save the present. That's as much as I can conclude from their approach to economics thus far.

The interesting turn in Charlotte's post can be found in the comments. What it amounts to is that Labour's banks have them by the short and curlies because they can't pay their bills. This article in the Times illustrates that cuts are the order of the day. 75% of the telephone lines at Labour HQ call centre are no longer operating as tightening up is forced upon them.

All this, makes the event appear to be a mexican standoff. The banks are pointing the gun at the Labour Party and the government is pointing its gun at the banks. One can only imagine a tweaking of the government nutsack by the banks to secure the bailout.

I have to agree with Charlotte in thinking that this done point to a conflict of interest. If the mexican standoff metaphor works then should the Conservatives disarm the government and discard the Labour Party then the bank will be the only one shooting.

This plays perfectly into the scenario I laid out in June that is vital for this country. Labour could go insolvent and drop out the top 2 parties. Labour was born out of the trade union movement and so it would be only appropriate that it dies a death at the time when the trade unions have lost faith that it is the party that will represent them in parliament.

Gordon Brown's letter's to the bereaved

2009-11-09T17:53:00.002Z

Mark this one in the diary because it is not very often you'll get me supporting our current Prime Minister. Today he is being slammed for one of the finer parts of his character. He takes the time to write personal, handwritten letters to the families of those that die on duty in Afghanistan.

Basically, his handwriting isn't up to much. Good handwriting is hard to find these days. It is incredibly harsh to judge him on his script. His heart is in the right place.

Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

2009-11-06T11:54:00.002Z

All year this event has been given the big billing. This is going when the authorities of the world are going to get together and decide what to do about the human pollution impact on the planet. I hope I'm not read as too cynical in my belief that nothing of the sort is going to happen.

Why is that?

Lets see who is attending and the views.

Amongst others: China, USA, EU, India, Japan, African Union, Gulf states, Small Island Alliance

No wish to commit on targets
We'll cut if you cut
Rich countries cut your emissions by 40% by 2020
Rich countries pay developing world to adapt
Rich countries provide low carbon technology
BRIC nations to commit on slower growth of emissions
Rich nations to cut emissions by 80%-95% by 2050
Financial aid to oil producers if agreement requires cut of fossil fuels

So much to reconcile and so much vested interest. There is a huge reluctance to commit to targets and make it a legal obligation. The 80% cut by 2050 (on 1990 levels) for rich nations gets the most agreement even amongst the rich nations, USA and the EU. However there are two very good reasons for that.
1: It's years and years away where not only is there a good chance that the people signing up to it will not be serving in office at the time, but it's also likely they'll be dead
2: We'll have burned near all of our oil, gas and coal so the carbon emissions will fall off a cliff because we have no further means of producing them

It won't be for lacking of trying. We're just not grown up and trusting of each other enough yet.

Afghanistan - Here for a long time

2009-11-05T12:03:00.003Z

The government line still sticks with supporting a corrupt leader in Hamid Karsai to end corruption in the Afghan police and army so that the nation becomes stable and doesn't allow the Taliban back in. After this is done, are troops can be pulled out and Afghanistan can be left to its own devices.

I hope you don't need me to point out the logical problem with that plan of action. Democracy doesn't exist where only one candidate stands for election. But, considering that's how we got our very own leader, it shouldn't be too surprising that this is how we recognise it as a democracy.

It took 8 years for WWII to begin (counting the Japan-China war as the start) and end. Of the 3 objectives for the Afghan war, none have really been met:
Over 8 years have passed since troops stormed Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden still evades capture. Saddam Hussain was captured in the same year as war was declared on Iraq in 2003.
Al-Qaeda is still claiming atrosities.
The Taliban are camped out in the Pakistani hills waiting for the coalition forces to go home.

We need a new strategy if we are to leave anytime soon.

Prime Minister's Questions - 04/11/2009

2009-11-04T12:01:00.002Z

12:01 - More fallen in Afghanistan. This time to a police turncoat, undermining the strategy in the war.

Good on the Speaker; Stopping Gordon Brown from going off topic on the NHS trying to refer to an comment from the shadow health secretary.

12:06 - Very subdued opening brace of questions from the leader of the opposition, David Cameron. Playing into the Prime Minister's hands at the moment.

12:10 - Finally moving to MP's expenses. Cameron is trying to get the PM to agree to the Kelly report. The PM agrees at the end of a long response.

12:11 - David Blunkett with a loaded question on the Tory situation with the Lisbon treaty. The speaker again doing a good job in directing the Prime Minister in his response.

12:12 - Nick Clegg is attempting to speak and getting heckled by the childish bullies in the House. Looking for a timetable for the Afghan cabinet clean-up. Sadly he's looking for a specific answer which the Prime Minister would never give even if he did have an answer.

12:16 - A Labour backbencher asking for a exit strategy/timetable. More bla bla bla as a response.

12:16 - A transport question. No real response again.

12:18 - NHS spending question. Again, nothing much in a answer.

12:19 - Helpful question on tax credits. PM response entirely geared towards keeping promises. Boom and bust anyone?

12:20 - Youth Parliament. Vote at 16 question from Labour backbencher. A direct response. The PM favours giving the vote to 16 year olds.

12:23 - Afghan serious injury figures question. No commitment.

12:24 - Helpful question on the car scrapage scheme.

12:25 - NIMROD crash compensation question. The PM resolves to deal with it.

12:27 - Question on rotting submarines. Dodges the question.

12:28 - Question on cutting nurseries. Another entirely unrelated jibe at the Tory Lisbon position.

12:29 - Question on the faithfulness of the Afghan police and army. Party line response.

12:30 - The Professor Nutt question. An orderly response.

Show's over. An easy ride for the PM. His strategy of making life easy on himself by bringing up the dead at the beginning of every session is working perfectly.

Breaking up the Banks

2009-11-01T21:11:00.003Z

Over the weekend, news has broken that Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling wants to break up the banks which the government owns a significant stake in. This is to increase competition.

"What I want to do now is begin the process of reform and reconstruction so we have got a safer, more competitive banking system with more high street banks than we have at the moment, with new entrants coming in"

New entrants? From what I've read, whatever is broken up is going to be sold on. Virgin Money, Tesco Finance and Santander amongst the names. No new entrants there. Before the banks all got eaten up into the larger entities, the profits were huge. Huge profits in a mature market means something is very wrong. Going back to the competition levels of 10 years ago may help a little, but it is a hardly going to make the banking system robust.

To make the banking system safer we need to address the now cliched "too big to fail" problem. Only a radical breaking up of the banks will help competition do its thing and control risk and pricing. More successful routes will be getting to grips with the fractal reserve system itself (which forces perpetual and ever increasing debt the more is paid in) and limiting areas for wide scale speculation, specifically in land.

Story: BBC, Reuters

Government Drug Advisor Cannabis Row

2009-11-01T20:32:00.004Z

If you have an opinion on anything. It can be politicised. When the opinion of yours, solicited by the government, is on drugs it be nothing but politicised. I would be horrified if the various advisory groups supporting the numerous government departments didn't bark when their advice was ignored by their minister.

Professor David Nutt was absolutely right to call the decision a whim. It clearly isn't based on science. Nicotine and alcohol being more dangerous substances? You won't catch me arguing against that. We all know that if those two drugs were discovered now they would be illegal.

It would take a brave government to make that happen. Naturally, because we haven't got one, cannabis gets a rawer deal. That said, I'm struggling to find the point of the classification system for drugs. If the issue we reclassification is that down grading a drug sends out the message that it's ok then the system is always onto a loser. Unless of course the figures must be revised upwards. Should a Class A+ come into being then you know what's going on...

Story links: BBC, Reuters

"Learn to Tolerate Inequality" We're Told

2009-10-22T18:49:00.003+01:00

Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach is vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Lady Thatcher during her spell in office.

He is quoted in the Times with this:

Lord Griffiths said the general public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all”, saying also that “we should not ... be ashamed of offering compensation in an internationally competitive market which ensures the bank businesses here and employs British people”.

An interesting argument. I'm not against inequality. There are people that are many times more useful to society than I am so why shouldn't they get paid many times more than I do? The support stops when we get to unearned inequality.

That's what we have in the finance sector at the moment. Any other sector wouldn't be able to hold us to ransom the way the bankers are. Why is it possible for them? They have the access of course. Thanks to the fractal reserve system they can make money without labour and pay themselves handsomely with it.

“tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all”
That's a statement of conquest that is. Rather than the hundreds that make up the bankers forego their unearned bonus, the millions that make up the public are told to put up with it. Far easier and noble would be the former than the latter.

Taxpayer's Alliance on Road Pricing

2009-10-15T22:01:00.003+01:00

I have to confess, I struggled to see the point of an article titled Road pricing blather from Boris on the Taxpayer's alliance blog "Economics 101".

The statement “There is absolutely no scheme in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to introduce road user charging in London.” followed by an anti road user charging commentary diminishes the whole thing. Weird. I had to comment.

The British do themselves a lot of self harm by our generalised obsession with home ownership, car ownership and apathy towards politics. If I haven't said that succinctly before it's worth saying now.

The car ownership argument is probably the harder one to sell. I think of it this way: when 50 years are up and all the oil is gone (with the exception of personal hoards kept by the very rich most likely) we will look back and think "What on earth were we doing allowing petrol to be purchased so cheaply and then burnt up travelling 100 yards to the top of the road."

With the exponential growth and demand for oil from the rapidly growing economies I think I'm being generous saying as much as 50 years. I think it'll be much shorter than that but I've put out a figure you may be able to get on board with. The dangerous figures that keep floating about are numbers like 250 years or 800 years. They are a nonsense based on the arithmetic of exponential consumption and ever decreasing discoveries of new supplies.

Selling Assets in the Deflated Market

2009-10-14T00:13:00.003+01:00

This weeks re-announcement of the sale of government assets originally announced in the 2009 Budget by Alistair Darling has received a rather poor response from the media and blogs. The reason for this is that this government has a track record of not getting the best deal and selling at the trough.
They've confirmed themselves that this isn't a good idea by scrapping plans to part privatise the Royal Mail on grounds that market conditions are poor back in July.

I'm of mixed mind on this. Criticising the government for selling low and not getting the best value for the taxpayer is easy. Counter to that is the willing selling of assets at the price they are worth now on a large scale will perform the write down of assets so desperately needed to bring us back reality.

Mitch Benn rounded up the situation best:

So now we've had a good look and realised where we're supposed to be. The only thing stopping us getting down there and building a proper platform to stand at this level of prosperity is the fact that there are still a huge number of people flailing around in mid air, Wild E Coyote style, thinking that they can still stay provided they ignore the laws of financial gravity long enough for someone else to build the platform.

So in this case if the government is going to sell I hope it starts a trend.

Expenses Are Back and Better Than Ever

2009-10-13T22:51:00.003+01:00

The big break was back in May when the Daily Telegraph started published details of leaked documents from the Fees Office. After years of digging their heels in, Parliament finally gave way and published farcical redacted documents a few weeks later. The difference between the two sets of documents proved that the Parliament produced record omitted details that would reveal the second home flipping.

Elliot Morley became arguably the first person on the planet to forget he paid off his mortgage. Oddly inconsistent are the dates if I have these correct. The mortgage was paid off in 2006 and claims were made 18 months subsequently. At the latest that makes the claims stop in June 2008. It was nearly a year later before he repaid the money.

Did he stop claiming because he thought he'd paid off his mortgage in 2008 or (much, much more likely) did he stop claiming but didn't feel he needed to pay overpayments to him back, only realising he did because the press got hold of it? If there is a case to be pressed for prosecution on fraud grounds, this is the one to watch. Morley has been out of the news since he decided to step down at the next election in late May.

Deciding to step down at the next election is the answer of choice for scores of MPs. Very few wish to force by-elections (Ian Gibson of the Labour Party did and votes for the party slumped by over a quarter passing the seat over to the Conservative Party) and there is some nice cushy parachute payments for serving the full term in the House of Commons. Speaks volumes. Good on Ian Gibson for doing the right thing when stepping down in such a scandal, which is to step down immediately.

What's new is the story is that the independent auditor has used his own set of arbitrary rules to determine what he believes MPs should pay back. What he deems as sensible limits that weren't explicit for cleaning and gardening for example. Retrospective rules are an ugly business. Is it really fair for the politicians to be charged for abusing rules to didn't exist at the time?

The MPs are an angry bunch at the moment, off the record. None are being stupid enough to say anything in anger on camera sadly. So now both the public and parliament are in equal moods, both feeling unfairly treated. The angry MPs still appear to be missing the point though. Allowances, as written, didn't specify upper limits where all good sense say they should have. Quite frankly, I don't understand how a garden is wholly necessary for a MP to perform his/her duty so a £1000 limit is very generous. The same goes for a cleaner and £2000.

Where Sir Thomas Legg proposes that they should pay back any money claimed and received over this amount they should bite the bullet and accept that this is punitive measure that is an indictment on their judgement. Their acceptance of this will prove that they understand the feelings of the electorate. If they can't make that sacrifice to prove their worth then that only goes to show they were only ever in it for the money. Serving comes second.

Labour Conference - Gordon Brown Speech

2009-10-03T18:34:00.002+01:00

Just back from my holiday in the glorious South West of England and playing catch up on the Labour conference. So I'll just share the notes I made whilst watching the Party Leader's speech:

Sickly opening by wife. Nothing in there that I or anyone else couldn't do. No reason why he is best to run the country.

Good praising on Labour achievements in the past 12 years.

Sickly praising of Harman and Mandy. Slightly more respectful praising of Darling. The face on Balls, who wanted the chancellor job going into the summer was priceless.

Statement saying we have 2 choices. That's not democracy and if it is, it's shit.

Back to the easy habit of Tory bashing. Yawn.

The whole theme of the speech seems to be that he doesn't understand that he has bought 2009 and hopefully 2010. The price is every year that follows. Any government could chose to do that. That's not the hard choice, that's the short term choice.

"What failed was the conservative idea that markets always self correct." If that's the case then there has to be the failure of the left wing idea that markets don't work unaided and that in 10 years they couldn't pick this up.

Claiming credit for the NHS. As a party yes. Unless I'm missing a trick he wasn't born at the time of it's creation...

"The banks will pay back the British people". Not likely.

Next election: 1st term of a new global age. Green ecomony, finance as the service not the master, bring all the talents of the country to bear.

250,000 new green British jobs. Lets see how that one will work.

"Will invest more in schools". The money for that is coming where?

"Started recession with the 2nd lowest debt in G7 economies" Reduce debt by 50% in 4 years. Raise tax at the top, cut costs and make savings for front line services.

Inheritence tax again. Little to do with Labour apart from them starting the practice... weird thing to mention.

Minimum wage. One of Labour's good points.
Ooh, next the welfare system. More uncosted increases.

Children having children. 16 and 17 year old parents to get supervised homes. Interesting idea.

50,000 most chaotic families to go on family intervention program. What a chart that is.

When talking about the service level agreements for policing I couldn't help but notice the conferences slow pick up of applause when 48 hours was the closing remark. Sounded like they expected 24.

Terrorism and immigration in the same sentence. Bad idea. That's BNP talk.

No compulsory ID cards. Only took a few years and a shed load of wasted money to work that one out.

Constituents right to recall their MP for wrongdoing. Good move.
Referendum for the alternative vote system. Also good.
House of Lords again. Good, but is it believeable.

More Tory bashing. Yawn.

Paying respect to dead soliders in Afganistan. Basically buying a standing ovation.

Long waffle on NHS with presumably rare personal letters from individuals positively affected by changes made by New Labour. Hate these kind of things. One side of a highly complex story.

The footy results coming in are taking my attention as the waffle continues.

Labour embracing hope. Hah! Too bloody right you do.

Beating cancer in this generation seems to be a big thing in this speech. How's that going to work?

Labour Conference - Mandy on Brown

2009-10-03T18:22:00.004+01:00

The problem is we, the public, don't know him.
"He's hard working, determined, conscientious, doesn't take no for an answer"

Apart from the fact the last attribute can be relabelled as 'bloody minded' this doesn't describe a unique personality yet alone whether that's all the criteria necessary and valued in a Prime Minister.

Where Lord Mandelson has more of a point is that we no longer listen to Gordon Brown. He will forever be haunted by "no more boom and bust", "not only have we saved the world" and "I take full responsibility, that's why I fired the man responsible".

Sure there are some things that can be forgiven. The change of heart on parking charges in hospital car parks for example. If you change your mind on that year to year you aren't going to find me giving much of a monkey.

When you've the steward of the whole economy, miss the forthcoming abyss and then shout and scream about how you should be praised for only seeing us to the edge and not falling yet, then you're not going to get off so easy.

The Woolas

2009-09-22T23:06:00.003+01:00

Phil Woolas, the Immigration Secretary, is an interesting minister to keep an eye on. This is purely for the way Joanna Lumley ripped him apart on the Gurkhas issue earlier in the year. It's hard to take him seriously after that.

However, it is shocking to see on Newsnight that Dominic Grieve, his Conservative counterpart, couldn't deliver a knock out blow on the debate over Baroness Scotland. As I breezed over in my last post, it's a no-brainer. Ministerial Code - "must comply with the law". If you get fined by our justice system guess what haven't done...

Better debating skills needed Mr Grieve

It Seems Rules are There to be Broken

2009-09-22T18:33:00.003+01:00

Following on from the expenses saga that so far has left no-one facing charges and has lacked any real consequence thus far for the MPs involved we have now moved to a time where the political elite can make laws and break them with no real consequence either.

We cannot have law makers who create rules and break them existing law. That is simple enough as it stands. But to break a law that you helped create yourself and still expect the power to create more is absolutely unthinkable. There is no possible defence for Baroness Scotland. She created an ill advised law that business was decidedly against because establishing the legitimacy of a potential employee's right to work is red-tape-tastic. She fell short of it, thus proving not only its unworkable nature but also that she isn't to be trusted making law.

The Oncoming Oil Crisis Gets Breezed Over Again

2009-09-22T08:19:00.002+01:00

There were two stories on oil yesterday that entirely contradict each other. One where the Total boss Christophe de Margerie warns that we (whoever that is) are under-investing in tapping reserves. The other where oil prices have fallen by near $3 due to lack of demand.

The fact that these stories come about on the same day illustrates the short term thinking that historians in 50 years time are going to regard as madness. Selfish self interest makes the discoverers of oil fields think that their finds are their exclusive property to sell on and make themselves ridiculously wealthy ignoring the millions of years it took to form.

They genuinely don't seem to care when it runs out, just so long as they get the right price now.

"Finders, keepers" is supposed to an expression found in children. I guess not.

Conference Season - Lib Dems - Part 2

2009-09-21T18:39:00.003+01:00

Vince Cable has finally come out with something mildly resembling a land value tax. It is being worded as a property tax in the media but so far as I'm aware the details are fuzzy. As the BBC puts it, we don't know whether the figures to determine the value of property will be from Land Registry figures, house sale prices or a valuation carried out by the local authority.

It's a start and a policy in the right direction. Taxing the value of property on an annual levy of 0.5% where it is worth over £1m. Personally, I don't think it stretches down low enough. I hate the introduction of artificial barriers. Speculation, and especially housing speculation, forms the heart of economic crisis' and we must bring about disincentives that limit it.

This week on Answer the Question - Yvette Cooper

2009-09-20T20:39:00.003+01:00

A nice little gem from Wednesday when Mrs Cooper shirked a question from an exasperated journalist (who seemingly had asked the same question a number of times).

This was when leaked figures from the treasury suggested that they have been working to a plan of 9.3% cuts once the election was bagged. All the while calling David Cameron "Mr 10%" and waffling about Labour investment vs Tory Cuts.

It's about 2 minutes into the video.

Source: BBC

Conference Season - Lib Dems - Part 1

2009-09-20T19:21:00.003+01:00

The controversy has begun. On the backdrop of education secretary Ed Balls saying he can save £2bn in his budget without affecting the quality of learning (which implicitly states that he's been wasting money) , the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has shaken the foundations of their flagship policy of scrapping tuition fees. This is naturally under the grounds that it'll cost too much in the current economic climate and it should be postponed.

I don't think it's the right line to take. The problem with party politics is that the leading parties all look far too alike. The Lib Dems need clear dividing lines and has to defend them strongly. If a flagship policy doesn't stand up to recession then they have to be very clear when they are talking about "nice-to-haves".

Personally, I'm not a big fan of scrapping tuition fees. The government wish to have a high level of univeristy attendance and that sucks up a lot of capital. Having 50% of the 18-21 year olds taking out of labour pool is a substantial finance burden and it needs consideration as to where those funds will come from. A low interest loan which waits for you to be bringing in a decent sized salarly before repayments begin is possibly one of the fairest ways divisable.

The Things You Hear a Labour Advisor Say

2009-09-15T21:29:00.002+01:00

Lord Mandelson leads the Labour Party. Sorry, that full stop came a bit early. Lets try again. Lord Mandelson leads the Labour Party into a new row with the Tories: Reluctant Labour Cuts vs Savage Tory Cuts.

There's a large dollop of truth in that line of thought. The Conservatives believe in a small state and because most of the civil servants the state employ are Labour core they have no problem making that number smaller. Labour on the other hand want the public sector big and protected to secure their core vote.

Go back three months and the line was "Labour investment vs Tory Cuts". This was Gordon Browns line and this change only shows him up as being either weak, stupid or both by having to be told by Alistair Darling and Mandelson that this phrase was never going to wash.

Also at the event where the Business Secrectary was speaking was a former advisor to Hazel Blears. Judging by the angle he was approaching the next election at he was probably the one that told Hazel that flashing a cheque in front of the TV camara was a good idea.

His view was that time has passed on so much that we may have forgotten or not lived through how bad and nasties the Conservatives were when they were in power and we'd be making a mistake to vote them in again on that basis. If only his memory was a little longer, stretching back to the 70's. With the same arguement applied, there's no way Labour would have been voted back into government in '97 if memory of their previous occupation was strong.

Very few will be voting Conservative because they think they'll be great or even good. Most will be voting to give Labour and Gordon Brown a well deserved, brutal and public punishment beating.

Brown Watch 15/09/2009

2009-09-15T20:47:00.003+01:00

I think I say this every week that I don't want to run down Gordon Brown each time I feel like writing a blog post but he just has this way of saying things that set me off.

His interview with bank-run horn blower/Business Editor of the BBC Robert Peston yesterday:

Peston: It turned out that our banking system here in the UK was one of the two weakest in the world. The other banking system that was in as much difficulty was the American banking system. Do you have no personal regret about failing to spot that?

Brown: No, I've been very clear. We should all have been supervising more.

You what? He has no regrets about not spotting the weakness of the UK banking system yet in the same paragraph says they should have been supervising more. The man that bought us and demanded "light touch" regulation knows it was a mistake but doesn't regret it.

Then he goes on about saying that we have learnt the lessons this crisis should teach us and that he wants to teach the rest of the world. All the while that sickly smile of his comes about as finishes the sentence that takes the scene away from the domestic to his more comfortable turf of the international.

Furthermore. He refuses to talk timing of these inevitable oncoming cuts in public spending. This time he's hiding behind France, Germany and the USA. Happy to lead when it comes to spending money, desperate to follow when it comes to saving it. For a man that has "saved the world" he don't half find it hard to just plain save.

The implied logic of that is he is not sorry about leading us into this mess. Reassuring that. Best let him get back to poisoning the well...

Housing and the False Dawn

2009-09-15T19:41:00.002+01:00

Thankfully there is at least Ernst & Young telling us not to read too much into the current housing statistics which the media is giving the rose tint treatment.

Things are looking up we hear. Monthly increases of 1% or so. The cash rich are buying and the few are selling. Not much of a surprise that the mild house price flop has evened out briefly. Loss aversion is rampant and there is little downside. The answer to affording the mortgage on an overpriced house is to lower the interest rate. Why move and lose money when you can stay on with the repayments maybe £100 or more less than what they were this time last year?

Eventually something is going to have to give. Interest rates can't stay low forever. Ever increasing borrowers in arrears can't be shielded from the lender's dogs indefinitely. The axe continues to fall as companies repair their over-extended balance sheets.

I'm not meaning to paint a picture of doom and gloom. It doesn't have to be that way. Just saying we've got to get real some day. With the UK average salary at £33k that would put the necessary average house price at roughly £140k (3.5 x salary + comfortable 20% deposit). We're not there by a long shot with average house price still lurking about the £200k mark.

Headline, until the housing market drops somewhere in the order of 30% we're a long way off sane housing prices.

Recovery - Or Something Like It

2009-09-13T19:48:00.003+01:00

Today was the first time I saw anything of 4 million as a headline feared jobless number as a prediction for the how extensive this recession could be. This came from Brendan Barber, the TUC leader.

Whilst there are recently published figures indicating we are leaving technical recession there is still consensus that unemployment is going to continue rising for some time to come. At the moment those numbers are coming from the private sector as the government "stimulus" and dedication to spending money that doesn't exist on the public sector continues.

Spending is going to have to ease off sooner or later. Redundancies aren't the intention but they will be coming. The "stimulus" is also based off outdated figures. When the treasury was expected to make a loss in July of £500m the loss turned out to be £8bn. We can't afford to be 16 times worse off for long. That would turn Darling's £175bn annual deficit into £2.8tn. Whilst I don't expect things to get that bad, the more figures like that show up, the quicker the "stimulus" will peter out.

Whilst keeping employment high remains a keen objective of any government worried about falling tax receipts, keeping a balanced balance sheet is more important.

Silly Season

2009-09-13T11:44:00.002+01:00

The media talk of August as the silly season. Which is somewhat contrary to what happens today when the political programming resumes for the autumn.

Already I've heard Alan Johnson talk of Gordon Brown as having no faults that need fixing (despite the Prime Minister's own confession to the trade union bosses that he does) and John Denham saying that we should trust labour to get the balance right when it comes to the UK PLC books when they are probably doing enough with "bringing spending forward" to do Enron proud.

Welcome back "sane" season.

Equality in Politics

2009-07-12T22:14:00.002+01:00

Gender, race, religion... all the diversity and equality arguments over representative cabinets would go away if the cabinet was any good.

Ah, I see why they're all kicking off again.

Vain Indications of Recovery

2009-07-12T15:54:00.003+01:00

You know you're looking at a headline desperate for positive signs in the economy when it reads: "Number of profit warnings 'fall'". Since it is the lowest figure since Q2 2003 it doesn't really give much away in itself apart from expectations are more realistic than they have been for six years.

After a year of economic correction, company profit projections finally have license to be closer the mark unlike boom-time where if you're not hitting stupidly high levels then the market cripples your share price.

What would be great is if we did move to more conservative estimates where so greed doesn't force us down the wrong alley again. Wishful thinking isn't the word.

A Load of Balls

2009-07-01T00:46:00.002+01:00

Just in case I need to remind myself why a person like Ed Balls should be kept as far away from power as possible:

Outright lies

Disinviting [sic] the local MP from a school

The King of Pop and the Queen of Reality TV

2009-06-26T12:36:00.004+01:00

I can't think of anyone outside of religion and royalty whose death will make a greater impact in the westernised world. Michael Jackson died yesterday at only the age of 50 and it is suspected to be heart failure. The man did absolutely brilliant work and it was only a couple of weeks ago I spent a Saturday afternoon playing hits off his 80's albums.

I can be rest assured that in twenty years time his music will still be well thought of works of art and that memory of him will be based around it rather that any of the controversy that surrounded his later life.

He is survived by all his brothers, his parents and 3 children. And that is where I find true sadness. Someone so lacking in talent like Jade Goody spent the last months of her life providing for her children. MJ enjoyed tremendous earning capacity for 4 decades and yet died in debt. I hope it comes out that he has hidden a large pot for them or at least that the aim of his recently announced tour was to make provisions.

With all the talent and reward in the world he still couldn't spend enough and died far too young. That is a reflection on the age in which he lived.

Forgive the Gaps

2009-06-24T16:59:00.002+01:00

Members of my very small readership have been commenting (verbally, not in the comments section, obviously) that I'm getting far to political and serious of late. Which I have found odd because I thought I'd always been this way. Still, I started this blog shortly before the 2005 General Election with this post.

If that didn't set the expectation of how this blog was going to operate when the economy finally cracked and a long overdue General Election was in the offing then you may not have been reading long enough.

Trying to steer away from all that and not put up any serious work in an attempt to turn this back into the comedic or occasionally interesting corner of the web has resulted in... well, nothing. Just a large gap in the dates between posts. Can't be said I haven't tried. I knew there's a lot of very personal blubber tucked away in the archives but my days of writing posts as if they were diary entries is past. Whatever I found therapeutic about placing those kind of thoughts into the void of the internet evades me nowadays.

So yes, anyway, posts are liable to be current affairs; politically, economically or otherwise based on my personal policies in the way of land value taxation, the population question and the paradoxical infinite use of finite resources. If my light hearted nature finds its way in there then all the better.

'Free Banking'

2009-06-24T16:28:00.003+01:00

The overdraft fee debacle reaches the House of Lords with the opening gambit that the fees are large because they pay for free banking. Without them, all current accounts will have to be paid for by the owner in the form of cost per transaction or flat monthly/annual fees or some other means of extortionate charge would need to be found.

I can see why the banks are worried. I've been with the same bank for all my adult life as many people have been as it is typically the custom. Because banking is free there isn't a great deal to think about when it comes to being a customer. In some respects you merely get what you pay for. People like me are happy to have the service paid for by the ill-disciplined lot who, god bless them, just don't get their financial act together.*

If I suddenly had to pay for the service then I'd suddenly start expecting service. And my god banks don't want that. They are happy with their customers coming to them via their brand power and have them stick.

Banking currently plays to the irrational human nature of loss avoidance. As it costs nothing, it's laissez-faire. If we were rational then everyone would be at the Halifax where you get £5 or something each month for paying your wages in. But we're not, because the gain is seen as too meagre for the hassle. When you're looking at a loss though, people change completely and do what they can to avoid it.

Reading material: BBC, Telegraph

*For those familiar with my agnostic ways and find the god reference a bit weird, you can thank Ned Flanders for the inspiration behind that sentence.

The Electoral System in the UK

2009-06-14T18:14:00.003+01:00

There is a lot of conversation going on about the 'rise' of the BNP, as meagre as that is, in the European election.

Because of the low turnout and proportional representation people are coming out with the age old adage of blaming the people who didn't come out to vote. Now these people always forget one simple, indisputable and unfortunate fact of the various systems we have in place. They all ask you to vote for someone.

If no-one gives me something to vote for in particular, above all the rest, then I have no-one to vote for. As happened in the European and local elections. And I'd tick no more for a random political party that wasn't BNP than I'd join a random religion that wasn't Satanic.

If you want me to vote against someone then you need to devise and present an electoral system to do it in a referendum. Then you'll get my vote.

Election Weak

2009-06-08T21:33:00.003+01:00

What a week it has been for our governing party. Widespread electoral failures on many levels but lets just pick some highlights:

Lost the 4 remaining councils in England that was under their control. Our central government now controls 0 local governments.

Forced into 3rd place by fringe party UKIP in the European elections.

By having tens of thousands of disillusioned voters abstain and not come to the ballot they have allowed a fascist party to reach the legislature for first time in the nation's history.

Beaten in Scotland by the SNP.
Beaten in Wales by the Conservatives.
Beaten into 5th place in the south of England.

Governing with that level of support is barely credible. Where's the programme? When was the last time we heard about "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", "education, education, education", the NHS or the 10 year transport plan?

We've been very patient with Labour. Beyond that, back in October 2007, Brown told the BBC:

“I’ll not be calling an election and let me explain why. I have a vision for change in Britain. I want to show people how in government we are implementing it. Over the summer months we have had to deal with crises. We have had to deal with foot and mouth, terrorism, floods, the financial crisis. And yes we could have had an election on competence and I hope people would have understood that we have acted competently. “But what I want to do is show people the vision that we have for the future of this country: in housing, health, education. And I want the chance in the next phase of my premiership to develop and show people the policies that will make a huge difference and show the change in the country itself.”

Some vision.

A Word About UKIP

2009-06-08T21:11:00.003+01:00

Whilst I don't think our relationship with Europe is ideal there is one major flaw of the UKIP success in the European election. We now have 13 well taxpayer funded people whose sole purpose is to tell us we shouldn't be in Europe whilst taking our scarce slots on the legislature itself.

If we really want out of Europe then we have to vote UKIP in the general elections so they take up the only position in which they can cut the cord. Voting them into European parliament where they attend and participate as scarcely as allowable is just wasting taxpayer money.

If the Lib Dems just keep their noses clean...

2009-06-01T21:55:00.003+01:00

I don't think the Lib Dems have quite grasped it yet but for the first time in nearly a century they could make a return to top two party politics. They have an ace in the hand in Vince Cable who continually talks sense in a manner which the public find agreeable. Feeding off the disaffection from both Labour and Conservative support is doing their cause plenty of good.

With Gordon Brown clinging to power in dictatorial fashion the Labour party faces being run into the ground come the next general election less than a year away. Labour are also not grasping the seriousness of the situation they face. The damage that they are doing could see them hit the same political peril that faced the Liberals in the 1920's once they hit 3rd in the results.

I would go as far as to say it is almost absolutely vital to the future prosperity of this country that the aforementioned event comes to pass. The vast majority of the population have never known any different from this unhealthy two party system where the Conservative and Labour parties take the baton from the other when they run out of public support or take the country to the wall.

Firstly, the public most know that there can be another order of things. It doesn't matter which of the two main parties are casualty to make that happen. It could have been the Conservatives in 1997. Hell, it could even be the pair of them. Secondly, we must have a party that is willing to adopt land reform. The Lib Dems are the most likely candidates to do so considering their previous incarnation had brought about the 1909 Finance Bill. Finally, we must have a party willing to turn the second House, the House of Lords, into a fully elected and active chamber.

Whilst the Lib Dems may not be the ones that finally bring through the reforms this country direly needs they must continue the progress they've made.

So don't go calling the Cornish nationalist candidate a twat in your literature. Deep in the documentation in the Cornish acquisition it transpires that they have more of a point for nationalisation than the Welsh do.

Misinterpreting Public Anger

2009-05-30T20:55:00.002+01:00

The media seen to have taken to the idea that we are more angry about the moats and duck islands than we are phantom mortgages. The premise being that the gulf between the wealthy Tory Grandees and the common man that their contempt of public money displays has caused a greater uproar than outright fraud.

This isn't quite true. The public are quieter about MPs 'forgetting' that they've paid their mortgage because it is so clear that a fraudulent act has occurred. The Metropolitan Police can step in and prosecute rather easily here. With the luxury purchases there is a matter of interpretation that acts as an interruption from serving justice.

Because this extra barrier exists the case must be fought that much harder. Forgone conclusions are given far less focus. The fury will come back when the fraudsters are not charged with the crimes that they have committed. Claiming for an expense where no expenditure occurred is clear as day fraud and prosecution must follow. Anything less will reveal that privilege breeds corruption in our Parliament and police.

Such a discovery I doubt the public will tolerate.

Forego

2009-05-12T22:09:00.003+01:00

Today, I'm actually sick to death of commenting on political ineptitude by our political elite. Trust me, today there's plenty of it:

David Cameron fronting a hard line but even himself sending a cheque in to HMRC because evidently one of more of his own claims was excessive. Then the Labour cabinet clamouring over themselves to follow his lead by copying the same policy and claiming it their own.

So I'll take a rest from the analysis and the search for causality for now.

Gordon Brown has not apologised

2009-05-11T17:25:00.003+01:00

Apologising on behalf of all "politicians of all parties for what has happened in the events of these last few days" is not apologising for the activities that led up to the events of the last few days.

He has not apologised for Michael Martin wasting thousands of tax payers money trying to scare off Heather Brooke by taking her case to the High Court
He has not apologised for not releasing the details in October 2008 when the court ordered the commons to
He has not apologised for the ill thought actions of politicians milking the taxpayer by rules of their own creation
He has not apologised for the changes in those rules that have made it easier for politicians to milk the taxpayer

He's not going to earn any respect back pretending to apologise.

MP's Expenses - Not the solution

2009-05-11T17:20:00.002+01:00

You can't describe something as "open and transparent" when what you're trying to do is fiddle the system so the information is no longer available via the Freedom of Information Act.

Forget it. It's not an option that will pass public scrutiny.

Good old speeding

2009-05-10T17:06:00.002+01:00

David Mitchell has been winding up the old motorists with his views on speeding fines. From a similar position of being a non-driver I'd likely run into the same critisms he faces. Reminds me of Vietnam... "you weren't there, man!"

I worry that people think the laws are static for some strange reason. Labour has changed and made up thousands of them in their time in office. It is ok to change laws and regulations when they do out of date. Otherwise you end up with it being illegal for taxi drivers not to have a bale of hay in the boot to feed their horse.

Some incontestable logic:
If a law is enforceable then it must be enforced else it is pointless.
If a law is unenforceable then there is no point in its existence and it is a waste of public money creating it.

So if cost is not an issue, because the fines paid by offenders more than make up the cost of installation and maintenance of the monitoring equipment, then the road should be entirely monitored.

Breaking laws because they are inconvenient is not an acceptable excuse. If you don't think a law is just then it's your duty to lobby for its change. I have never understood why so many people protest about the speed limits and yet have no desire the change them.

DNA Database - Put simply, bad idea

2009-05-10T10:22:00.003+01:00

Just in case anyone thinks a fully inclusive DNA database of the entire nation and any visitors to the nation is a good idea, I offer you this thought:

Millions and millions of records on a database are subject to two huge compromising problems. First being that they require many administrators to keep up to date. Secondly, the bigger the amount of data stored the larger risk/amount of clerical error.

Now, if you were leading a criminal organisation, and heard news of this development you're going to want access to that information aren't you. So you'll get a man on the job either creating the thing of administrating it.

This government has a history of sending confidential information in the post and losing it, leaving it on trains or having it on display for the press to photograph. As for trusting clerical accuracy; watch the news on expenses roll in. Jack Straw's council tax bill anyone?

If you trust this government to keep hold of that kind of information visit your GP. It's likely they'll need to pass you on to a neurologist.

MP Expenses - The Timing

2009-05-09T11:22:00.002+01:00

Great to see Nick Robinson caught cold outside Westminster late in the evening as the Telegraph expenses story was breaking. No time for spin, just the story.

Given time now look what happens. The government reaction so far consist of feign responses of "it's allowed by the rules" and calls to investigate the leak that led to the Telegraph's possession of the expenses list.

If it's a leak then it confirms what is on there to be true. Pursuing legal action down that dangerous road can't be a good idea. But then that is the ludicrously weak Phil Woolas who got led around by Joanna Lumley a couple of days ago. Hard to take him seriously any more. Although it does explain why nappies were on the receipt.

So, it's early May and the list is alive, full and piece by piece being entered into the public domain. When were the Commons going to publish the list (after blanking some key details)? July. After the local and European elections. For a bunch that think nothing is wrong with what they are doing, they have made a hell of an effort to stop the public judging for themselves.

What's this business you speak of?

2009-05-07T20:55:00.002+01:00

I do like Lord Digby Jones for his enthusiasm for business and highlighting the basic point: you want public services paid for? Then you need business.

I watched his interview on HardTalk from March this year. Blaming the media for reporting doom and gloom goes a bit far. There is this horrid balance to strike for the media. Sure, you've got to allow for confidence to return to the economy, but you've also got to stamp on any bullshit attempted to be spun out and distributed by the Downing Street propaganda mill.

Not a criticism of Labour in this instance; you can bet your meet seat that the next administration will be doing little different. That is just the fundamentals that apply with the current political system.

Lets just be careful when he talks about business and public anger. That's not business, that's banks. Companies collapsed during the boom time, that's widely accepted as just what happens. It's important that failing businesses are allowed to fail; it tells you that they are no good or not needed. The fact that we built up a framework where banks are not allowed to fail is the main cause of the furore. Nature is not allowed to take its course.

That is what destroys confidence. When people are allowed to make huge mistakes and everyone suffers except the perpetrators then confidence will remain shattered. It will rebuild when we can trust that the fall out of risk is felt by the persons taking the risk not the nation.

The expression "too big to fail" must not be allowed to surface again. That's what competition law and regulation exists for. As yet I haven't seen any movement that will prevent privatisation of profits and socialisation of risk when this correction (recession, you may call it) passes into memory.

Gurkhas

2009-05-01T17:51:00.002+01:00

I don't really stand on either side when it comes to the Gurkhas settlement issue. Are they mercenaries and should be treated as such or are they fighters for the British army in a very different way?

I'm not sure and I am not going to expel any effort in finding out.

That said, any Labour MP or supporter spouting nonsense about them letting 6000 into the UK when the previous administration allowed none is deliberately misleading you. They were allowed to settle in British owned Hong Kong (much closer to Nepal) before the handover of that territory to China.

Budget 2009 - Part 3: Invest to Grow

2009-04-23T00:27:00.003+01:00

New Labour has brought us the historically brief age of consumer debt. If you borrow money so that you can be more productive then that is fair reason to be in debt provided the increased productivity more than services the debt. Eventually you get to the point where the surplus replaces the debt for future investment.

You don't get much of that with government spending. Their job is mostly to deal with things that are necessary but not profitable enough for the private to have a go at. The Post Office/Royal Mail and Network Rail are such money sinks.

Investing to grow is fine provided that the money goes into projects or systems that increase productivity. When it comes to governments think transport, communications and such like that encourage employment or make doing business easier.

Poor IT projects doomed to failure, ID cards and 10 year old car trade-in schemes to name a few are places where our money is being flung at where they aren't necessary and offer no return on investment.

The government have now 'discovered' areas for efficiency savings. Isn't it amazing how such things don't exist when an opposition party suggests them? By saying that they didn't exist is exactly the same thing as the government saying they are spending our money perfectly with no waste. Don't believe any government that ever says that. When the pressure is on, somehow, they will always show up and prove them wrong.

The Budget - Part 2: Top Rate Income Tax

2009-04-22T23:59:00.003+01:00

Populist and political is this measure. 50% income tax on earners of £150,000+ per annum could make gains on the public coffers but it isn't assured. What's been created is a stronger incentive to find a loophole. The rich are great with accounting (the gap between rich and poor gets perpetually wider as the rich know how to protect their wealth and the poor do not).

Mark these points:
1. Don't think this will do for the treasury what they'd have you believe
2. The move is far better politics than it is economics
3. You don't need to feel extra appreciative of the rich, they won't be coughing up much as it'll go into capital gains, pension funds and the like

If you're going to tax the rich properly then you can't have these various rates knocking about. If you are going to have your wealth in this country (go to high and they could move of course) then all of it, however it is dressed up, should be taxed at a consistent rate so you know what you're getting. Of course the best bet is going by Fred Harrison's land value tax.

The Budget - Part 1: Borrowing

2009-04-22T23:27:00.004+01:00

Everything you needed to know why Labour cannot be voted into power in the next General Election came about today.

What does their manifesto mean? Nothing. Income Tax rises.
What do their forecasts mean? Nothing. Growth wrong, unemployment wrong...
What do their measures mean? You can deal with it your finance shortages later.

The Chancellor is out by a massive 15% on the expected borrowing of the 2008-09 financial year on a prediction he made 6 months ago (£90bn rather than £78bn). If he can't predict the level of borrowing, which he enjoyed full control over, in the past 6 months with any accuracy then it is unthinkable that he can predict with will happen to GDP which is subject to only his influence and not direct control.

Do not believe a word of it. We will be lucky if Alistair Darling only pollutes our economy to the tune of an extra £175bn in the 2009-10 financial year. Variance to the magnitude of his last prediction would take it over £200bn. You have been warned.

Then there's the question of the price of that future borrowing. People don't just lend the government money. They buy bonds and gilts which promise future returns. If there is no trust in the Chancellor and his vision of the economy then they are going to expect bigger returns on their risky investment in the government.

With only a few shaky calculations at this early juncture we can see ourselves harbouring 100% GDP of public debt rather than the predicted figure of 79% for the parliament after next. A crazy peace time situation.

Logic Flaws in Responsibility

2009-04-19T10:35:00.002+01:00

I have to wonder if I would spend less time 'Brown bashing' if he didn't make it so easy. In response to the anger surrounding Damian McBride he says:

"I take full responsibility for what happened, that's why the person responsible went immediately."

Um, if you take full responsibility for something and the person responsible gets sacked, then there is only one thing that can happen to you...
Anything short is not taking full responsibility, obviously.

Queue more eye rolling.

The Times and fishy VAT figures

2009-04-12T11:05:00.005+01:00

The problem with reading anything in April is that there's always a shadow of doubt that even the well reputable are fooling you. Reading today that, of all papers, The Times is making a nice concession to Alistair Darling on his VAT rate cut.

Now, as a pricing operations person, I can reliably tell you that implement this temporary cut is nothing but a complete pain in the arse. As a consumer with disposable income it has not influenced my spending in any real way. My main vice is books with VAT at 0% anyway.

The move was criticised at the time because:
1. Prices were nose diving anyway
2. The value of the decrease was so infinitesimal small it really wasn't worth the bother

News that the cut may have actually worked sound certainly be listened to but also paid close scrutiny.

First job: Who's the source?
Ok, that will be the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Seemingly an independent consultancy. Good for the the first part at least. Now... oh oh:
"We interpret what is really happening in their business and in their environment to provide clear projections and forecasts for their future."
That's a problem. No one does that, at least not with any accuracy and moral decency.

Second job: Vested interest? (No pun intended)
A Google search for 'CEBR VAT' reveals this opening headline: "VAT must be slashed to avert crisis, warns CEBR." This is in The Telegraph dated 12th November 2008. And they were insisting on a 5% cut rather than 2.5%. So in order to validate that their own warnings were correct it could be argued that it is in their interest to prove not only that the cut worked, but a bigger cut would have worked better.

Final job: Methodology?
Sadly, nothing on their website about this. So I'm going to have to go by David Smith's article and assume that it is a comparison against the last recession in the '1990s. Alarm bells ringing, varibles everywhere. I'll open to being proved wrong here but I very much doubt that they could have collected enough quality data to be able to isolate all the varibles to establish which ones, either individually or (much more realistically) in combination, are triggering better performing retail sales than compared to the last recession.

The biggest obstacle in assessing the impact of the VAT cut is that it is totally dwarfed by the huge factor that is the base rate of lending which stood well over 10% last time compared to 2% and lower since the VAT cut came into effect.

So before we begin to write history and conclude that the VAT cut worked (stop chuckling) lets find evidence from a source without a vested interest in the result and some incredibly robust methodology isolates the monstrous varible of the base rate.

Sources: TimesOnline, Telegraph, Mortgages.co.uk, CEBR