Skip to content

October 2008

George and donations

OK, so he discussed a donation and laid out what the law was about how such a donation could be made. Then we get this:

It is then claimed that the party decided not to accept the money. However, neither Mr Rothschild nor Mr Deripaska were told of this decision and no written record has been released detailing that this decision was made.

Hmm, well, that\’s pretty simple to work out. Look at the register of donations and see if the donation was made. If it wasn\’t I think we can safely conclude that the matter wasn\’t taken further.

One other thing. Bonus points for the first person to see a Lib Dem weighing in on this. For of course they accepted a donation, a very large one, which was channelled in exactly this manner.

 

 

Those Chagos Islanders

From the newswire:

A long-running legal battle by families expelled from their homeland islands in the Indian Ocean will be decided today at the House of Lords.

Hundreds of Chagos Islanders are expected to arrive for the ruling by the Law Lords on the Government\’s last chance to keep them from returning home.

Some 2,000 residents were forced out when the British colony was leased to the US in the 1960s to build an airbase at Diego Garcia.

The courts ruled in 2000 that the Chagossians could return to 65 of the islands, but not Diego Garcia.

In 2004, the government used the royal prerogative to nullify the rulings, but this was overturned by the High Court and Court of Appeal.

In June this year, the Government went to the House of Lords to argue that allowing the islanders to return would seriously affect defence and security.

It\’s extremely difficult to see that the Government has a leg to stand upon here. Here\’s hoping the Law Lords agree.

 

Interesting argument from Polly

However, opinion polls are consistently anti-abortion on other grounds in the province, so shouldn\’t they be allowed self-determination? Is this another kind of imperialism? Not if you believe individual women have an inalienable right over their own bodies.

Leave aside the particular point she\’s talking about and look at the particular point she\’s making.

We have an inalienable right to our own bodies and it\’s not far from that to Mill\’s point that we have an inalienable right to the produce of it. Which means that the taxation of our labour to fund the desires of the majority is a form of imperialism: we should be free to opt in or out of the system, just as Polly is arguing that women should be free or not to have an abortion, as they wish.

Sadly….

After saying this:

Instead, he said, the Government should insist that “our rights are priceless” and that: “The best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.”

He\’s retiring.

New OECD report

Prizes and secret masonic handshakes for the first to spot someone distorting these findings.

We have a high level of relative poverty….another way of saying that we are an unequal society. Which, given that we are more involved in globalisation than most other societies, doesn\’t surprise me in the least*. But this line:

While both the richest and poorest have been getting richer….

The prize is for spotting the first person to rewrite this as the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

 

* The argument here is that there will be, in any society, a few who can play on the global rather than just national stage. So a more open, globalised, economy will allow those few to make pennies each off billions, rather than just pennies off the national millions. Tiger Woods doesn\’t make $100 million a year by taking $10 each off 10 million American golfers. He takes $1 each off 100 million global ones (numbers purely as an example).

 

Solving the banking crisis…

The Richard Murphy Way!

Some of the things that the state owned Network Banking operation will supply to each bank will be: 1. The basic trading platform for the bank, which means that it will not be necessary for each to develop its own IT to do this independently, so removing the massive inherent problem of economies of scale which have caused concentration in the banking market to date for this reason;

Yup, the people who brought you the NHS Spine are to be put in charge of developing all banking software in Britain.

Well, no one can accuse him of not thinking outside the box, that\’s for sure.

True but unfair

The Treasury was forced to borrow a record amount in the first half of the present financial year as the Chancellor’s tax revenues continued to fall short of his plans, emphasising the mounting stress on the Government’s finances.

Total net borrowing by the Government from April to September soared to £37.58 billion, up drastically from the £21.46 billion figure for the same period in 2007-08, official figures showed this morning.

The all-time peak for first-half borrowing, the highest since 1946,

Well, yes, the highest since 1946 it may well be. But if we\’re not going to adjust for inflation then it\’s a pretty meaningless figure.

And there\’s another issue as well. Adjusting for the size of the economy. Borrowing at present in of the order of 3 or 4 % of the economy (very roughly) and it has been a great deal higher, 10 % and more (and while I can\’t remember what is was in 1946 it was a hell of a lot higher then).

 

Ever Higher

Two of the main venues in the Olympic Park may have to be nationalised, with the taxpayer paying nearly £900 million extra as the credit crunch hits the 2012 Games, The Times has learnt.

That\’s another 10% on the budget then and we\’ve still got four years to go.

Hurrah!

New climate change report

The WWF says it\’s all happening much faster than anyone expected, that the year old IPCC report is now out of date and AIEEEEEEEE!!!! WE\’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!

Hmm.

Arctic sea-ice in September 1979 and 2007, showing the biggest reduction since satellite surveillance began.

Might I just point out that sea ice cover in the Arctic increased this year?

Snigger

Sarkozy bank account raided in internet scam

Fraudsters siphoned money out of Nicolas Sarkozy\’s bank account after obtaining the French leader\’s user name and password.

It\’s almost as good as Harriet Harman using the user name Harriet and the password Harman on her blog.

Greens and nuclear

This poses an interesting question really.

Normally scans to diagnose a new cancer or determine if it has spread would be carried out within one or two days but some patients are being forced to wait up to a month.

Hospital across the country are affected and at some points individual trusts have been working at only 30 per cent capacity.

The problem is due to a shortage of radioactive isotopes as a series of reactors are closed for maintenance or have faced unexpected problems.

Now we know that various Green types are adamantly against nuclear power generation. They say it\’s because of the evils of Teh Radiation and so on.

But what\’s the position on the medical use of isotopes? And, of course, their manufacture in reactors?

Note that it\’s a different sort of reactor, you don\’t just bung some stuff into Dungeness and then treat people. But it is a reactor, you do get radiation from it, you do get both high and low level waste, you do have to enrich the fuel and so on.

So you\’ve got all the same problems as you do with nuclear generation. So, do Greenies abhor this? Do they say that the risks of us all being murdered in our beds by Teh Radiation mean that we shouldn\’t be using these isotopes in medicine? That it is better that such patients die than we be exposed to the risks?

Anyone actually know whether there is consistency here?

Oh fuck off, really, just fuck off.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

No, please, just go and do something useful for a change will you? Drown yourself in your own urine or something.

Quite apart from the insane insistence that the government has any right to know who owns a communications device it won\’t work anyway. It\’s not exactly difficult to buy a SIM card from another country where you do not have to offer such proof of identity.

Sure, your calls will be more expensive but that just means that only the criminals, to whom such privacy is highly valuable, will be outside your monitoring system.

Just do fuck off.

Well now, who would have thought it?

The search for success has spawned a motivational industry worth millions of pounds and libraries full of self-improvement books.

It is practice, however, that makes perfect, according to the sociologist whose books have become required reading within the Conservative party. The best way to achieve international stardom is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills, says the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point.

The harder you work the luckier you become, no?

Oour Wullie

Figures out next week will show that the third quarter of this year was the first to show lower growth since 1992.

What? First to show lower growth? You mean that every quarter since 1992 that growth has been going up? That it\’s been accelerating?

What is this drivel William?

You mean this is the first quarter that has shown negative growth, an absolute reduction in output.

People want to work.

Erm, no. Many do it is true, but there are some who do not, some who are entirely happy with their tithe from the State. To assert that no one at all has a preference for a low income low effort lifestyle is an extremely odd thing for an economist to say. For of course one of the basic points of the subject is that we all have different preferences.

In recessions there is always a renewed impulse for fairness.

Again, no. It works entirely the other way around. The more stress you place upon a human the more selfish they become. It\’s the fat and well fed who will offer the scraps from their table to the destitute, not those worrying about their own source of calories.

The question is how to go about it. Long years of boom have rusted the ideas of how the public budget can best be deployed to alleviate unemployment and inject crucial compensatory spending power into the economy during a recession. The best I have seen is a 2008 paper by the Washington-based Brookings Institution, \’If, When, How: A Primer on Fiscal Stimulus\’. Authors Douglas Elmendorf and Jason Furman show that by far the quickest and most effective means is to put cash into the hands of the unemployed by raising unemployment benefit, increasing temporary cash payments to them for specific items such as food and clothing, and making benefit unconditional for longer. It is not just they need the cash; they spend it fastest.

Bwahahaha. As Richard Layard (a proper economist, not just a journalistic one) has pointed out, if you subsidise something you get more of it. So if you subsidise unemployment you get more of it. For precisely the reason given above, that there really are some people who would choose not to work….and that number rises the higher the unemployment pay becomes. You know, this odd idea that incentives matter.

Chancellor Alistair Darling is working on plans to bring forward infrastructure spending planned for 2010 and 2011; he is correct, especially as already earmarked plans are more likely to be executed when they are needed than those dreamed up from scratch. He set a target of £5bn.

Snigger. £ 5 billion? A fart in a thunderstorm in a £1.4 trillion economy.

How does this man keep his column?

Mission Impossible

It simply cannot be done.

It comes as an Observer investigation reveals that planning delays, long delivery times, escalating costs, 10-year hold-ups in connection to the national grid and technical problems in building offshore windfarms all threaten to derail Brown\’s ambitions. The result could be electricity shortages by 2020, failure to meet climate change and energy targets and possible hefty fines from Europe.

Building only windmills just ain\’t gonna work. We need nuclear and coal as well. Otherwise the lights go out.

Worth reading that piece actually, lots of comments like this.

\’The numbers do not add up,\’ said energy analyst Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University. \’It is physically impossible for the industry to meet its target.

12 years to the brown outs. Thanks Greenies!

Those bank dividends

Q: What happens if Lloyds TSB shareholders reject the HBOS takeover?

One of the few bargaining chips the City still has with the government is in deciding whether to press ahead with the arranged marriage between HBOS and Lloyds TSB. Shareholders in Lloyds have to vote to agree to take over HBOS and may baulk if they feel they are losing too much in the deal. If this happens, the government may have no choice but to take HBOS into full state ownership as it did with Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. This would dramatically increase the cost of the bank bail-out to taxpayers and could reignite panic over the solvency of other banks. For this reason, many expect the Treasury will have to reopen negotiations with some leading institutional shareholders over the question of dividend policy.

Interesting, however….it\’s not actually the government in Westminster that gets to decide this.

It\’s the government in Brussels that has already decided this point. Neelie Kroes has said that dividends cannot be paid until the preference shares are redeemed. And that\’s it.

We can negotiate away all we like but unless she changes her mind we\’re stuck with it.