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Newspaper Watch

The fury of the ex-wife scorned

Catherine Bennett:

If the churchmen, with only historic precedent to justify their seats, can survive in a much smaller, reformed house, then a similar case can be made – and apparently is being made – for the continued existence of the Lords\’ vast numbers of bumptious hereditaries, placemen, poltroons, soaks, spongers and, in a smaller yet equally tenacious way, perjurers and thieves?

Hmm.

Formerly married to Robert Sackville-West[1] (1985–92), she is the partner of BBC journalist John Humphrys.[4]

OK:

Robert Bertrand Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville (born 10 July 1958) is a British hereditary peer.

The eldest son of Hugh Rosslyn Inigo Sackville-West and Bridget Eleanor Cunliffe, he inherited the title of Baron Sackville on 27 March 2004

Missed out on being Lady Sackville did we Caro?

 

Woolly Hutton and his knowledge of the tax system

Britain\’s tax take from property is, in the round, absurdly low.

Sigh.

Low compared to what you fucking dingbat?

Last time I looked domestic and business rates together were £50 billion and rising. Over 10% of the total tax take.

Oooooh, look!

The UK raises near 12% of total revenue from property taxation. That\’s the highest in the OECD and over twice the OECD average.

Maybe that\’s not enough, maybe the system should be different. But if you\’re to pontificate on matters economic you should at least have a rough notion of what you\’re pontificating upon.

What he, and other banks, need is the capacity to bundle up new loans into new aggregated investment vehicles that the Treasury can indemnify, and which can then be bought by investors or by the Bank of England\’s quantitative easing programme.

Not satisfied with proposing Gordon Mac three weeks before Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae when bust, now he\’s suggesting that we should have a Willy Mac for business loans.

Dear Lord, does reality never prick Woolly\’s little bubble? Haven\’t we just seen what happens when we do this? The largest bankruptcies ever?

Guardian subs report for retraining please!

Privatising our roads will be a terrible deal – just as it was for the telecoms and water industries

Report after report shows that the myth of greater private-sector efficiency in doing public works is just that: a myth

That\’s the headline and subhead.

In the actual piece
:

Were I a true believer in bringing in the private sector, I\’d argue that the best way to do this would be to open up the market to full-blown competition. I\’d point to what happened to telecoms after BT was privatised.

The argument actually is that telecoms provatisation did work because it brought competition.

D\’ye think the subs even bothered to read the article?

Very strange from Polly

Next, the gender gap that was narrowing is widening again fast; women lose more in public sector jobs, childcare, tax credits, benefits and homecare for the elderly as if their incomes and independence had been targeted deliberately.

How can that actually be, given that we do not include benefits or tax credits in our calculations of the gender pay gap?

In fact it gets worse than this. I once calculated that at average wages the payment of child benefit to the mother for one child actually closes the gender pay gap entirely.

And I\’m afraid that you\’re really not allowed to switch between definitions of said gender gap like that. It\’s either market incomes or it\’s post tax and post benefit both times, not one once and t\’other another.

Strange of the Observer to report this

The complicated tax structures set up by the firms, or by their parent companies, make use of corporate entities in the British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Jersey, Guernsey and the Cayman Islands, according to a report entitled An Unhealthy Business compiled by the website Corporate Watch and revealed today by the Observer.

You mean like Guardian Media Group, owner of the Observer, does?

I doubt it somehow

Fifty teams rolled out their box carts ranging from giant eyeballs and Japanese WWII fighter jets…..

What Japanese WWII jets?

There were English and German ones in that war but Japanese? Don\’t think so…..

Polly on economics

While UK growth stagnates, Obama\’s US grows by 2.2%. While the UK economy has shrunk 3.9% since the crash, the US has recovered all it lost, and more. As our unemployment rises, theirs falls. Stimulus works, austerity sucks out the air.

Umm, what\’s the size of the budget deficit? £150 billion? 9% or so of GDP?

This is austerity is it?

Blimey.

Average real earnings fell again last month and 22.5% of the young are out of work. But locked into group-think, nothing in the budget will change our dismal trajectory, because economic ideologues learn nothing from experience.

So you\’ll be joining those non-ideologues who point out that here we have proof that a too high minimum wage will cause disproportionate unemployment rates in the young and untrained then, eh? You know, like those dangerous radicals at the Low Pay Commission?

Will he cut the 50p top rate? That\’s political suicide. If he capitulates because it\’s raised too little due to tax avoidance, that\’s caving in to civic robbery.

Working less so you eanr less is now civic robbery eh? How very, very, Soviet.

Raising the threshold to £10,000 will cost £5.3bn

Agreed, this is a linguistic, not economic, point but I refuse to agree that allowing people to keep more of their own money is a \”cost\”. It isn\’t, it\’s a reduction in the cost of government on those who get to keep their own money.

Pankaj Mishra: Nice try dearie

Apparently Hindu on Moslem sectarian violence in India is to be blamed on globalisation.

Nothing to do with the burning to death of a train carriage full of Hindus immediately preceding the riots, nothing to do with the long simmering (some 500 years or so) arguments over the Ayodhya mosque/temple and nothing to do with the, erm, millennium or more of Hindu/Moslem violence and arguments.

Nope, globalisation is to blame.

If some local tosser tried to argue that where we buy out lentils from caused the 7/7 bombings then even The Guardian would laugh rather than publish it. Ms. Mishra seems to get a pass as she\’s writing from foreign and the Brit lefties are ever so gullible about foreign.

Guardian leader

Just 11% of the planet\’s land surface is suitable for agriculture,
…..
Two billion extra souls will need somewhere to live, which means that precious farmland will disappear under pavement, or be quarried for minerals.

Err, why not dig up and live on the other 89% of the land?

George Monbiot on Ayn Rand

You knew that he wasn\’t going to get it quite right, obviously.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States.

Somewhere between 1917 and 1925 the existence of properous Russian families was extinguished.

Rand was born Alisa Zinov\’yevna Rosenbaum (Russian: ????? ?????????? ?????????) on February 2, 1905, to a bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She was the eldest of the three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum, largely non-observant Jews. Rand\’s father was a successful pharmacist, eventually owning his own pharmacy and the building in which it was located.[4] Rand was twelve at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, during which her sympathies were with Alexander Kerensky. Rand\’s family life was disrupted by the rise of the Bolshevik party under Vladimir Lenin. Her father\’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks, and the family fled to the Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. She later recalled that while in high school she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason above any other human attribute. After graduating from high school in the Crimea, at 16 Rand returned with her family to Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving.[5][6]

After the Russian Revolution, universities were opened to women, including Jews, allowing Rand to be in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University,[7] where she studied in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history.[8] At the university she was introduced to the writings of Aristotle and Plato,[9] who would form two of her greatest influences and counter-influences, respectively.[10] A third figure whose philosophical works she studied heavily was Friedrich Nietzsche.[11] Able to read French, German and Russian, Rand also discovered the writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, who became her perennial favorites.[12]

Along with many other \”bourgeois\” students, Rand was purged from the university shortly before graduating. However, after complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many of the purged students were allowed to complete their work and graduate,[13] which Rand did in October 1924.[14]

George again:

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced.

That \”postwar world\” is carrying a lot of weight there, don\’t you think?

Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru\’s philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down.

And I\’m afraid that Greenspan never was actually \”in government\”. He was Chair of the CEA under Ford and then Federal Reserve Chairman. The first is an advisory post, the second a banking or monetary one. And he had no control over what tax rates were, Congress is who decides what laws are made or repealed and the Fed isn\’t even the bank regulator….the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, multitudes of State offices etc.

And derivatives trading didn\’t bring the system down either. Mortgages did. Which aren\’t regulated by the Federal Reserve either.

Labour exploitation in Bangladesh

You\’d think they could find a better example than this, wouldn\’t you?

My seven-year-old son always complains in tears about me not coming to drop or pick him up from school. But I have to be at work all day. My daily routine starts at 4 am. I wash up, then cook breakfast and lunch for the family, get my son ready for school and finally set off for work. Reaching the factory gate before 7am is compulsory. Work starts half an hour later. For nine hours I toil, with a one-hour lunch break, and start for home in the evening. It takes me more than an hour to get home on the bus.\”

Petronella speaks out!

The state penalises women who are childless and unmarried: \’I might be single, but I’m not a failure\’
As new figures show that marriage is becoming more popular, women are persecuted for being solo and childless.

Err, yes.

I\’d certainly say that the photographer has done her no favours at all. Or perhaps the picture editor: that particular expression should have been better left out of the paper I think.

But there\’s another point entirely that can be made. And this might not be what society ought to be but to a certain extent it\’s what it is. Those young women who trade looks and vivacity into a career are in possession of a wasting asset, those looks and vivacity. When that asset has wasted it\’s not all that much of a surprise if the career falters a little.

And on the marriage and children side it\’s not entirely surprising that if one spends some years in a long term affair with one\’s married editor, aborting one (or was it two?) along the way, then as those assets waste then that alternative career as wife and mother becomes a little less achievable.

Or as an economist might put it: there are opportunity costs to every decision made. It is indeed glorious that women now have many more choices but that just means that there are therefore more such opportunity costs. And as the economist might then go on to say: having made your choices please, please, don\’t whine about the costs of them.

So what effect will EMAP have on The Guardian?

I\’m not quite sure about the details of this story. But it could have interesting implications for the finances of The Guardian.

Sources close to the company said Apax would not be able to recoup its investment in Inform, but is keen to sell the unit before its value falls further.

Emap is understood to have seen a boost in trading at its magazines in the first two months of this year, but a decline in advertising revenues and pressure on subscriptions has dragged down valuations of some publishing businesses.

The point is that EMAP is a joint venture between GMG and Apax. GMG is part of the Scott Trust Ltd and the point of that is to earn money aso aws to allow for the continued publication of The Guardian.

The thing is, if the EMAP deal is a bust, how much of GMG\’s money does that lose and what then happens to the finances of The Guardian?

Henry Porter really is an ignorant little twat isn\’t he?

Supermarkets have been blighting our land and lives for too long

An inquiry into the pernicious power of these retail giants should be an urgent priority for the coalition

Whooo! Gosh. Umm:

Supermarkets emerge unscathed after third major inquiry in eight years

Correct. We\’ve been though this three times already uhnder the last, Labour, government. Now I agree that they didn\’t find as you would wish but that they didn\’t do so has a number of possible explanations. They\’re neo-liberal bastards entirely in the pockets of the capitalists for example. Or quite possibly that you\’re just wrong.

As you are in some other matters:

It seems absurd to think of large grocery and hardware shops as the cause, or the facilitator, of so many avoidable ills, but barely a week goes by when the actions of supermarkets are not held responsible for some kind of harm, whether it\’s to overweight teenagers, the pub trade or the farming industry.

It\’s true that they are accused of many things but that\’s rather a result of a vocal minority wishing to blame them for many things. Because, you know, there\’s a group who simply believe that supermarkets are wrong and who will grasp at any straw to try and convince the rest of us. Start looking around the nef offices….and the thing is, when the adults actually sit down and try and wor5k out whether these accusations are in fact true, they find they\’re not.

and you see they all benefit from paying hourly rates that are well below a living wage, which means the taxpayer is forced to make up the rest in tax credits.

Jesu Christe you fucking dunderhead. Entirely arse about tip. The value of labour is determined by the demand for that labour and the supply of it. As it happens a substantial portion of the citizenry believe that people should not have to live on what the value of their labour is. Thus some part of society is taxed in order to raise the incomes of those low value labour peeps.

They promise jobs and pay peanuts, and just when every business in town is on its knees, or has gone bust, they replace people with automatic checkout machines that ask for your Nectar card.

And what do you think happens if you insist that there should be a living wage paid to all workers? That the supermarkets must pay more than the market value of the labour on offer? Yes, quite, those nectar self service checkouts come all the faster and thus fewer are employed. Raising that \”subsidy\” that the taxpayers must pay to those now unemployed.

At present, Hay is a delight to visit; apart from hosting the world\’s greatest literature festival, its streets are filled with variety, animation and a sense of community. The business of shopping in Hay, whether for books, antiques or groceries, is a pleasure, but this plan will kill the town. Campaigners estimate that a supermarket would reduce trade for local shops by between 20% and 75%. Traders in Hay\’s open-air market will be snuffed out and the town will fill with To Let signs, charity and gift shops.

But why would this happen? If shopping there for groceries is a joy then people will not abandon that joy for the supermarket aisles, will they? And if they do then it\’s not quite such a joy, is it? This is revelqaed preferences all over again and the \”campaigners\” are on entirely the wrong side of it. Their own very allegation, that the shoppers will abandon the small shops to stalk the soul less shopping centre is the very proof that we need that the shopping centre, the supermarket, is what the citizenry desires.

but in Britain the supermarkets push products drenched in fructose and sucrose without qualm.

Oh dear, you\’ve been reading the Americans again, haven\’t you? HFCS is not really used over here in Europe, it\’s pretty much entirely an American thing.

Supermarkets now account for about 20% of all book sales in Britain, following the suicidal decision by publishers to cut cover prices for supermarkets in order to gain market share.

Err, no. They\’ve not cut cover prices. What they had was the legal right to insist upon a book being sold at cover price taken away from them. In fact, cover prices haven\’t changed at all. It\’s the discounts from cover that have. Jeez, I\’ve a niece who can rant better than this Henry.

But it is the supermarkets\’ oppressive behaviour with British farmers that makes you wonder at the complacency of our legislators. According to the Competition Commission report in 2000, the buying power of the supermarkets means \”that the burden of cost increases in the supply chain has fallen disproportionately heavily on small suppliers\”. Farmers are going out of business in what the National Farmers Union says is \”a climate of fear\”.

The supermarkets protest that savings are passed on to the consumer. Nonsense. Look at their profits.

Cretin. To see whether food prices have fallen you need to look at food prices. Have food prices risn against general inflation? Fallen?

The answer is, roughly, that they have risen in the past couple of years as the effect of the devaluation of the currency has come in (as we know, we import a lot of our food) and for the couple of decades before that food prices actually fell against general inflation. Making the consumer better off and that\’s the person we care about, the consumer.

Across the political divide, there is awareness that supermarkets are abusing their power. Now we need action – a Leveson inquiry for supermarkets that looks at the total impact on jobs, suppliers, the nation\’s diet, the environment, diversity and planning. This should be followed by the creation of a tough regulator and legislation compelling supermarkets to meet the standards of a fairer, healthier, sustainable, more modern and enlightened society.

Twat. What the fuck do you want an inquiry for if you already know what the conclusions will be?