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Tim Worstall

Ritchie on HMRC\’s non-execs

Entirely wrong of course. Disgusting. Ritchie and Prem should be there without a doubt:

Now as I say, these may all be fine people, but that’s not my point. It is ludicrous that no one has come up through HMRC of any other civil service strand to this position. No wonder morale in HMRC is so low.

And it is ludicrous that we have one third of the non-exec board ex big 4 firms with another third from big UK retailers with almost all the rest from big business.

Hmm.

HM Revenue & Customs\’ (HMRC) Non-Executive Directors are senior business figures from outside the department who bring a diverse mix of expertise and skills from across both public and private sector.

By definition Non-Executive Directors are senior business figures from outside the department. Ritchie is complaining that Non-Executive Directors are senior business figures from outside the department.

Isn\’t it just appalling that we appoint people to aid in running a big and important thing people who have experience and success in running big and important things? Just shocking I tell ya.

The Czech election

This is rather fun. One candidate in the current Czech presidential election is formally called:

Karl Johannes Nepomuk Joseph Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Menas Fürst zu Schwarzenberg

Think the Duke of Buccleigh running for president of an independent Scotland.

Sorta. Or perhaps the Duke of Normandy for that of France (which would be a real pleasure to see happening actually).

He\’s said that perhaps the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans wasn\’t quite all that fair. Probably true in fact.

It was all rather understandable at the time but really rather unfair.

One of the mines we\’re interested in is actually right on that dividing line. The same deposit has two shafts into it. One on either side of the border. And if you were of German ancestry in 1945 and lived in the \”wrong\” village then you\’d be prodded by bayonet over to the other. As were 3 million others from all over the area. This city I\’m in, all the ones around, all the little villages: entirely ethnically cleansed.

As I was saying yesterday about The Guardian, Mussolini and The Vatican

In an investigative report, The Guardian said that the portfolio had been \”built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929.\”

Sources within the Holy See however said that was misleading and historically incorrect.

The Vatican received money from Mussolini\’s government as recompense for the extensive properties it lost when the papal states were invaded and occupied by the Kingdom of Italy in the 1860s.

The money was paid out under the Lateran Accords of 1929, the agreement by which the Mussolini government recognised the Vatican City State as a sovereign nation and the Church gave up its claim to the former papal states.

It was compensation for the millions of pounds\’ worth of property that the Church lost under the accord, such as the Quirinal Palace in Rome, a former papal palace which is today the residence of the Italian president.

The fact that the Vatican had property holdings around the world was no secret, said Father Federico Lombardi, its official spokesman.

\”I\’m bewildered – this article reveals nothing that was not known already,\” he said on Tuesday.

\”The existence of property investments by the Holy See, bought with money paid by the Italian State as compensation for expropriated assets, has been known for more than 80 years. \”I\’m amazed by the publication of this story – it doesn\’t reveal anything new.\”

Quite.

The incredible success of the Green Deal

The Coalition hope to update 14 million homes under the Green Deal as part of plans to reduce carbon emissions.

Impressive ambition.

Despite months to prepare, 600 trained builders on standby and the involvement of 40 organisations, including household names like B&Q and British Gas, it looks like few people are interested – nevermind queuing up to be the first in line for a loan.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) admitted that so far only five people have registered on a central log to show they have been assessed and are ready to take out a loan.

Hmm.

And this is just an obvious effect of government involvement:

There is also concern that smaller builders, that many people rely on, are not accredited to carry out the assessments.

The Federation of Master Builders, the UK’s biggest building trade body, said only one firm from its 10,000-strong membership has signed up to become an accredited Green Deal installer.

Brian Barry, Chief Executive of the federation, said local firms do not have the time or money to spend on training.

Yes, we can all imagine how the bureaucracy would make it expensive to be accredited to install loft insulation, can\’t we?

It might be rather fun to try and see just how much it does cost to become accredited. What the training requirements are. Anyone willing to place a bet on there being diversity requirements?

Impressive numbers, eh?

Office for National Statistics figures obtained by Mr de Bois show that in the ten years to 2011, a total of 3,599,000 people permanently left the UK.

Contrary to the perception of the typical emigrants being older people retiring to a life in the sun, the figures show that 1,963,000 of those who left were aged between 25 and 44.

By contrast, only 125,000 people of retirement age emigrated.

Quite seriously impressive numbers actually.

Research for the Home Office last year found that almost half of all Britons who emigrate each year are professionals and company managers.

So that report by the Work Foundation insisting that there is no international market for British management looks a little thin then.

So why are so many sodding off?

I\’m sure the weather has something to do with it. Ditto the tax system.

I originally left for work reasons. Moved again for same. Came back for a little bit and found, well, not that I had left Britain but that to some extent Britain had left me. That happens when you\’ve been off for a decade or so. So I left again.

And everywhere does indeed have the same sort of intrusive government that we all complain about.  But there is a difference out here. In much of the world (at least, in many of the places I\’ve lived) both sides, both governors and governed, know that this is an imposition. That the description of government as stationary bandits is true at least in part.

Thus there\’s a wariness about being too serious about the rules, about those impertinent demands. In both the US and the UK I\’ve found it different. Those imposing the rules really do think they are defending civilisation from the hordes that would destroy it. As an example, for complex reasons my flat in Bath was declared an HMO. I can just about, just, get the points about kitchen doors therefore having to be fire doors. It\’s a standard Bath Georgian, one flat to a floor. If three of five are owner occupied it\’s not an HMO, if three are rented it is. Odd that owner occupiers are free to burn to death in a way that tenants are not but there we go. The perils of national legislation: they had to abandon the idea of providing fire exists when whole streets are, front and back, Grade II* listed.

But I really did fail to see why the law insisted that there must be 1.5 m2 of preparation space in the galley kitchen. And whether this was legally necessary or not depended on how many other flats in the building were rented or not. And what I found worst was that everyone was dead serious about enforcing this. To the point that there were demands that I should redo the entire kitchen or the whole house would be declared unfit for human habitation.

The Men With Clipboards.

In Portugal the same sort of building regs. In this case it was about having converted a door into a window. A quick chat around the back and a flash of a brown envelope and we were done. We both knew that the laws had no real meaning at all, that they were really an excuse for a rent to be demanded.

Is this corruption? Sure. Am I happy with corruption? Nope, not at all. But, all in all, I do have to say that I prefer it to an army of people seriously trying to enforce the millions of rules and regulations that plague us all.

It\’s actually that most admirable of British (perhaps English?) characteristics. We do take the law seriously. The deal has always been that there will be few of them but we\’ll obey them. But for me that deal breaks when there\’s so damn many laws. In the end I prefer living where one can and does scoff at most of them, while still obeying the important ones. There are parts of the world where, keeping your head down of course, not being too obvious about it, you can just get on with life without having to bow repeatedly to Those Men With Clipboards. Something that I don\’t quite see as being true in England any more.

Yes, weather, taxes, cost of living, work, all have an influence. I simply couldn\’t do what I\’m now doing in Czech in the UK for example: the geology is wrong. But over and above that, and it\’s close to absurd to put it this way, there\’s a sense of being freer now outside England than inside it.

Another very odd way of putting it. By living outside England I\’m able to live rather like it used to be possible to live in England. Sure, they demand permits and licenses and permissions: but nothing very much happens if you don\’t knuckle under. Which brings me back to I\’m not sure that I did leave England. I\’m almost carrying a little bubble of it around with me as I go. I\’ll obey (and do) the important laws and the others, well, they don\’t really exist do they, as they didn\’t used to. It\’s England that left me.

I\’ve had the same conversation with both German and Czech engineers about mining law. Sure, you need a license to go mining. But the terms of those licences are interpreted expansively. Even the bureaucracy agrees that if something is even vaguely permissible, just possible to squeeze into the strictures, then you can do it. I just don\’t think that English rules and regs are treated that way. Rather the opposite, if it\’s even vaguely possible that it isn\’t allowed then it\’s verboten.

Timmy in Czech: Food Edition

To follow all this stuff about how appalling a cook I am (which I know, 20 years with a woman who is a good cook and who refuses to eat anything at all that I prepare beyond a cup of tea, will do that to a bloke) I am in Czech and my dinner, self cooked of course, is a Portuguese dish.

Bitoque.

So Yah Boo Sucks!

 

 

 

True, this only works for those who don\’t know what bitoque is but go look it up.

Please Guardian, get it right on the taxation of royalties

Revenue and Customs is only supposed to permit such arrangements if multinational groups can demonstrate that brand licensing agreements, or any other intra-group trading, are conducted at \”arm\’s length\” – that is, as if the companies are not part of the same group.

No. That rate should indeed be arms length. But the actual arrangement: well, if it\’s to another company in the EU it\’s actually illegal for HMRC to try to tax such payments. The importance being here that:

David Cameron this month pledged to make \”damn sure\” such firms pay their fair share in the future. \”It\’s simply not fair and not right what some of them are doing by saying: \’I\’ve got lots of sales in here in the UK but I\’m going to pay a sort of royalty fee to another company that I own in another country that has some special tax dispensation.\’\”

Cameron can bluster all he wants. It\’s just not a piece of law he has any control over.

 

You heard it here first folks: beating climate change with plankton

There\’s been stuff around for years about how we might beat climate change with iron fertilisation of the oceans. The only argument has ever been over how expensive/efficient it would be.

Now there\’s been the work done to look at another potential addition to the ocean:

Sprinkling billions of tonnes of mineral dust across the oceans could quickly remove a vast quantities of climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new study.

Good, eh?

The oceans already dissolve billions of tonnes of silicate minerals which flow into the oceans in the sediment carried by rivers. Adding more silicate would alter the species of plankton that grew in the oceans, said Köhler. \”Silicate is a limiting nutrient for diatoms, a specific class of phytoplankton. The added silicate would shift the species composition within phytoplankton towards diatoms.\”

Indeed it is and when it does dissolve it forms silicic acid.

You are absolutely correct. There are only certain parts of the oceans where iron is the one missing nutrient. So this can only be done in certain parts of the oceans.

The next necessary experiment is to look at adding silicic acid as well. Another missing nutrient for diatoms in certain parts of the oceans.

Who knew, eh? The comments section at Forbes is 6 months ahead of Environmental Research Letters.

So here\’s a question in The Guardian we can answer

The Guardian asked the Vatican\’s representative in London, the papal nuncio, archbishop Antonio Mennini, why the papacy continued with such secrecy over the identity of its property investments in London.

Hm, gosh, I wonder.

How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini\’s millions……the church\’s international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini……Since then the international value of Mussolini\’s nest-egg has mounted until it now exceeds £500m……..The surprising aspect for some will be the lengths to which the Vatican has gone to preserve secrecy about the Mussolini millions……..The Mussolini money was dramatically important to the Vatican\’s finances…….The Mussolini investments in Britain are currently controlled……..While secrecy about the Fascist origins of the papacy\’s wealth might have been understandable in wartime,

Because, you know, if they were clear and open about it then some shit stirrer is going to write a piece bandying about \”Mussolini\”, \”Millions\”, \”Fascist!\”

All of this quite apart from the fact that this was not all about Mussolini. It was the settlement of the Risorgimento, signed up in the Lateran Treaty.

Effectively the Kingdom of Italy compensated the Pope for having nicked all the Papal Territories back in 1870. And negotiations had been going on since about then as well.

You could, indeed I would, make a rough equivalence between this and the recent Czech compensation of the churches. The Commies and others knicked all the land. Eventually, compensation was paid for having done so.

Let\’s abolish corporation tax!

When a system is broken, the best approach is generally to scrap it and try something else, and that’s precisely what the solution to the corporate tax problem is – not further meddling, but to get rid of it entirely. In fact, it’s more than broken; it’s also poisoning the rest of the tax system in the round.

Quite.

Just get rid it. No more taxes on profits, no more allowances, no more distortions.

Instead, business needs to be coaxed back into fulfilling its proper social function of investing in new ventures and creating well paid employment. Again, this purpose is best fulfilled by making profit a tax free zone, thereby providing the incentives for vibrant private sector expansion.

Yup.

Part of the quid pro quo for an enlightened tax regime should be the steady introduction into low paid employment of a “living wage”.

The joy is that this would happen quite naturally. Given that well over 50% of the incidence of corporation tax is upon wages, the removal of corporation tax would, over time, mean that wages rise.

Hurrah, trebles all round!

Isn\’t it strange how the left has changed?

Diane Abbott, a shadow health minister, will tonight warn that the \”pornification\” of culture is causing children to be \”hypersexualised\” at an early age.

At a meeting of the Fabian Women\’s Network, she will say parents are struggling to cope with the tide of sexual images available on social networking websites and the wider internet.

\”For so long, it\’s been argued that overt, public displays of sexuality are an enlightened liberation,\” she will say.

\”But I believe that for many, the pressure of conforming to hypersexualisation and its pitfalls is a prison. And the permanence of social media and technology can be a life sentence.


It was only a generation ago that the left in Britain were insistent that nudity was natural, that sex was fun that should not be denied as a result of outdated modes of morality. Hell, it was only a couple of decades ago that the left seemed almost insistent in ushering young men into their teenage daughters\’ bedrooms and locking them in for the night.

What happened? Ian\’ll be along in amoment to tell us it\’s all the Puritans. Or mebbe they don\’t like the results of what they campaigned for? In which case we should be seeing some interesting mea culpas soon enough.

My own diagnosis is that there are certain people, Dianne Abbott being a good enough example, whose existence is only validated by telling people to do something different from what they are. If everyone\’s a model of Victorian primness then the shriek will be that free love is a necessary part of civlised society. If everyone is indeed practising free love then Victorian modesty is the only valid more for society to allow. It\’s not that either is better or worse. It\’s that, by definition, whatever people are doing is wrong and they must be controlled to do the other. After all, Kips Esquire\’s Law does require that someone should do the controlling and there are those who do insist they are in the vanguard of those who ought to be.

What is being controlled and to what end is much less important than the controlling itself.

Dear Sir David Attenborough. Which of your siblings should have been killed?

The nutter from the Optimum Population Trust is ranting again:

Humans are plague on Earth – Attenborough
Humans are a plague on the Earth that need to be controlled by limiting population growth, according to Sir David Attenborough.

Oh aye?

The television presenter said that humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species by using up the world’s resources.

He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.

Sir David, who is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, has spoken out before about the “frightening explosion in human numbers” and the need for investment in sex education and other voluntary means of limiting population in developing countries.

The first and most obvious question to ask in response is, \”Well Sir David. So, which two of your three siblings should have been killed then?\”

For population growth does indeed come from a couple having more than two children.

The second thing that should be pointed out here is that we do in fact know how to manage this process of curtailing growth in the number of humans.

Get rich.

Everywhere it has happened, everywhere this species of ours has gone from rural and Malthusian destitution to a bourgeois urban middle classness, the population growth rate has fallen like a stone. Indeed, so much so that it becomes the population contraction rate. It doesn\’t actually need you and Jonny Porritt demanding full body condoms for all. It only requires that people know they can eat three times a day, have a roof over their heads and that there\’s a decent chance that all the children they do have will survive into adulthood. Absent immigration there just isn\’t any population growth in the rich world. Far from it, there\’s contraction (to be absolutely accurate you have to adjust for it taking until the second generation of immigrants to reduce childbirth down to the rate of the indigenes).

And amazingly, we\’ve also cracked this \”Get Rich\” commandment. We do know how to do this. The last 30 years show us that we do as well. In essence, globalised markets. That\’s pretty much it actually. That is what has driven the largest reduction in poverty in the history of the species. Concurrent with which, and no, it ain\’t just coincidence, we\’ve seen every demographer rapidly revising down their numbers for future population.

Sure, there are things that can be done at the margin. Women who want contraception, great, campaign to get it to them. Why not? Do recall though that it\’s the wanting to use contraception which is important and drives 90% of actual fertility. Availability drives only 10% or so of it.

My suggestion is therefore, if you really are worried about population growth (as opposed to Porritt\’s insistence that there are just too many damn peasants), that you campaign for free trade. Will do more to reach your declared goal than anything else. In the absence of your doing so I\’ll just conclude that you are ignorant whereof you speak.

Timmy in Czech

Found the Marmite!

Tiny, tiny, just one jar wide of shelf space, bit of Tesco\’s.

And not quite HP but Tesco\’s own brand \”brown sauce\” which appears similar.

And the one that\’s driving me up the wall. Salad Cream. Yeah, I know, chemical muck but I like it. And I know that damn Tesco\’s sells it because I\’ve bought a bottle from them. Someone had stuck it back into the mayonnaise shelf, at which point I snatched it up.

But can I find the real shelf of it? Can I buggery.

Dinner tonight is almost healthy. Passata, onion, chili pickled garlic, add some tuna and serve over pasta.

Yes, let\’s have a house building boom

A 1930s-style building boom could bring back growth

House building after the great depression revived the economy, tackled overcrowding and kept property prices stable for years


Great idea.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, has been pressing cabinet colleagues to adopt the 1930s approach. He thinks house building is the way to get real demand into the economy quickly, and has championed the idea of government guarantees for housing associations. He said in a speech last year that there was a virtuous circle in the 1930s in which higher mortgage demand led to an increase in house building, which in turn led to lower prices and greater affordability, leading to still higher demand. \”Houses built by the private sector rocketed from around 130,000 in 1931 to almost 300,000 in 1934 and it is estimated that house building contributed almost a third of all employment increases in this period.\”

Super. Sadly, Larry Elliott completely fails to mention that a 1930s style housebuilding boom would be illegal these days. Suburban ribbon developments? The planning system wouldn\’t allow it. Large gardens? Can\’t have them now, got to put 14 dwellings per hectare.

And there\’s no way at all that the planning system will provide plots for 300,000 houses a year.

Which means, as various of us have been saying for years, that you need to reform the planning system first. Get it back to what it actually was in the 30s. Where the plot price was 5% or 10% of the total price of the house, not the current 50% to 70%.

Of course, having done that you\’d not need to do anything else, you\’d have already solved the problem.

Maimed I am, emotionally scarred. I saw a Jimmy Savile puppet

The BBC has apologised after screening a repeat of a children\’s television programme featuring a character dressed as Jimmy Savile.

An episode of The Tweenies filmed in 2001 was shown on CBeebies before 9am on Sunday.

In the episode, a character called Max presents a Top of the Pops-style show. Wearing one of Savile\’s trademark tracksuits topped off with a blond wig, he uses the disgraced presenter\’s accent and utters the catchphrase: \”Now then, guys and gals.\”

A BBC spokesman said: \”This morning CBeebies broadcast a repeat of an episode of The Tweenies, originally made in 2001, featuring a character dressed as a DJ impersonating Jimmy Savile. This programme will not be repeated and we are very sorry for any offence caused.\”

Viewers tweeted about the gaffe. Kenny Senior wrote: \”Are BBC trying to self destruct? Max from Tweenies dressed as Jimmy Savile just now nearly chokes on my cornflakes.\”

Please, do fuck off and get a sense of proportion.

Do sod off Mr. Grayling

Chris Grayling said the Government should not always be paying for the most senior QCs to defend suspected criminals when cheaper junior lawyers could do the job just as well.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four\’s Today programme, he said the £1 billion legal aid bill spent on criminal cases is too high when budgets are being cut across the Government.

\”If you look at the daily rate for a senior QC it can be between £1300 and £2,000. For somebody who\’s going to become a QC in a month\’s time, it\’s just over half that amount,\” he said.

\”The question is can we really afford so often to use people who are paid such an additional higher rate compared with somebody\’s who\’s nearly as experienced, who\’s a seriously competent barrister, who will become a QC one day if they choose to do so.

You\’re aiming to take the liberty of the person you\’re prosecuting. Yes, you do need to pay for the lawyer to defend that person.

End of.

Whinging about how much it all costs: there are two things the nation state is meant to do. Defend the country and provide a court and justice system. Those are the two pre-requisites. Everything else it does is subordinate to these two. So if you\’ve not got enough money to do these two then you\’d better just stop doing some of the others to pay for these two.

Shock Horror! Parents want children to be professionals!

Ethnic minority students \’forced into medicine and law\’
Teenagers from ethnic minority families are coming under excessive pressure from parents to push for medicine and law degrees at top universities, the Government’s higher education access tsar has warned.

Blimey. That certain minorities push children into the professions. Such a shocker isn\’t it?

Never mind that it\’s been the mainstay of Jewish jokes (ie, jokes told by Jews, not necessarily about them) for well over a century. That more recent immigrant groups, Hindu and Chinese for example, follow suit just isn\’t all that much of a surprise. You manage to make landfall in a new society, work your fingers to the bone doing the scut work as that recent immigrant. You look around and try to identify the cushy spots and encourage your children to go for them.

Christ, it\’s such a fucking cliche that Tom Clancy uses it as a plot device. The Vietnamese widow running a 7-11, all of whose children are in pre-med or law school.