Almost five decades of experience… and I write THIS?
The BBC website reports:
Banking minister Lord Myners has said banks were “foolish” to offer 100% mortgages, after Gordon Brown called for “prudent and careful” lending.
Er, no, I don’t think that’s the cause of the current problem, although it certainly doesn’t help after things have gone wrong. But it surely didn’t start them on that track. No, that was clearly something else. Continue reading ‘Which mortgages were ‘foolish’?’
Here are some excerpts of what I wrote during the last few days of the 13 day attack by Israel on Gaza. It’s a basic summary of news reports, official figures, analysis, and my own opinions. I support both the State of Israel and Palestinian Statehood, but this recent conflict shows up one side to have lost rather more humanity than the other. Continue reading ‘The Path to Peace in Gaza?’
British MPs have enjoyed what is known as “Parliamentary Privilege” for hundreds of years, since Henry VIII in fact. This has prevented them from being arrested in Parliament, and allowed them free speech immune from prosecution.
It is the job of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Serjeant at Arms, to protect and uphold the rules of the Houses of Parliament, and to protect parliamentary privilege. In fact, the English Civil War was started when the King attempted to have five MPs arrested within the House.
On 27th November 2008, it happened again. The police marched in and arrested Tory MP Damian Green, searched his office and took away his computers and disks. Without a warrant.
Unfortunately, it seems we have a rather weak Speaker of the House at the moment, and his Serjeant at Arms seems to have just caved in to whatever the police asked of her. Not only did she not refuse them access, which is her duty as well as her job, she also didn’t ask the Clerk of the House (pdf) for advice on what she or the Police could or could not do, and then she even signed a Consent Form allowing the police entry to the MPs office without any involvement from anyone else.
In such a case as this it would be easy to paint her as the scapegoat in this story, but to my mind it shows more a portrait of the Speaker as a weak man with little control over his underlings, and from his own mouth little knowledge of events that are his responsibility. He clearly has an iron grip on things.
Meanwhile, Jacqui Smith, Home Office Minister in charge of the Police claimed “ignorance” about the matter, although she did admit in Parliament that the Cabinet Office was involved – and she is of course a member of the Cabinet. The Serjeant at Arms, always previously an ex-Army officer who enforced the rules rigorously but now no more than an office manager who clearly didn’t know the rules and who didn’t request to see a warrant just let them walk past her rather than doing her job of protecting Parliamentary privilege. Scottish Labour MP and Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he has a “great deal of confidence” in fellow Scottish Labour MP and Speaker of the House, Michael Martin.
The Speaker of course has a lot of power over MPs, so you won’t hear many of them slagging the Speaker off. But over his own underlings, clearly he exercises little control at all. For instance, today the Speaker, rather limply, if not exceedingly limply, only managed to squeak out some ineffectual nonsense about he “did not know the Police did not have a warrant…” Clearly he should be more in control of his underlings so they do inform him then.
One of the foundation stones of any healthy democracy is adherence to and respect for the rule of law, but it seems even at the the highest levels of British political life, liberties are being taken that affect all our freedoms.
It certainly seems we need more than at anytime a Government which believes in Civil Liberties, rather than one composed of either of today’s two most partisan parties, the Labs or the Cons. Unfortunately, I don’t think the LibDems yet have the ear of the people although they probably do have many of the right ideas.
Today UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced a £20 Billion fiscal stimulus package and an increase in borrowing to a whopping 57% of GDP or more. Tax cuts on consumption (much of which comes from imports) are to be paid for by future tax receipts (much of which comes from earnings paid to bring those same imports in).
Well, this is what happens when you base an economy on consumer spending funded by debt underpinned by house price inflation (at the expense of manufacturing and productive industry).
For years, some people have imagined themselves to be better off because their house “doubled in value” in a short space of time, and then spent some of the “profit” on consumer goods to re-equip or redecorate or restock their new house after a move, or their current house just because they were bored with the old look.
Personal debt, underpinned by this artificial feel good factor soared, and when the debt bubble collapsed it showed that the housing bubble was not newly created wealth, but a thin veneer with little substance.
Maggie Thatcher created this monster with dual attempts to kill off the power of the unions and turn Labour voters into Tories. She attacked the Unions by killing off manufacturing, she turned large numbers of non-rate paying council house owners into poll tax paying property owners who could begin the process of accumulating debt as their artificially cheap houses rapidly increased in value, giving many people the false impression that this would always be the case.
Few people have wanted to criticise this gravy train which ran for two decades until hitting the buffers last year.
What this government debt package is effectively doing is attempting to transfer some of the personal debt into government debt. They picked VAT rather than income tax because they thought the UK might follow the US where 80% of any tax credit is saved, not spent, meaning it has far less impact as a fiscal stimulus. Because you only save tax with VAT if you buy something, 100% of the money would be used to enhance consumption, they hope.
This does rather seem to miss the point that if the large part of people’s previous disposable income came from increases in unsustainable and ephemeral house price increases, with no such increases today, 100% of the money that was available to spend is now missing from the economy. Therefore, no 2.5% VAT tax cut will fix it, although over the course of a year it will mean people can buy more things.
Doing nothing as the Tories suggest isn’t an option either though. I am, of course, ignoring their stated aim of reversing the hike in income taxes from 40% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. Other than lining their own pockets though, they really have no idea what to do, or perhaps the correct word should be “no inclination” to do anything other than play party politics and utter disingenuous sound bites.
Having said that, judging from George Osborne’s delivery in the House earlier today one can only assume he wishes to drink through the crisis. He slurred his words, both his boss and his colleague who were sitting next to him in the Commons looked concerned he might fall over or totally lose it, and he gave the distinct impression of someone who had clearly had too much to drink. Well, he is an ex-member of the hard-drinking Bullingdon Club. Just like his boss, Cameron then. Which is why he got the job – his degree isn’t too hot if you look him up on Wikipedia…
Getting back to finance, and Tory claims that borrowing on borrowing is not the answer, they singularly fail to provide any idea of what they would do: they have no clue really, do they? Anyway, businesses use overdrafts when things get tight, and people borrow money on mortgages when they want to build a new house. But that’s what happens when you have a Tory Party stuffed with too many lawyers and accountants and self-promoting ideologues who have never taken a risk in their lives – well, not with their own money anyway. You can’t equate government spending with household budgets, even though Maggie Thatcher made good politicial use of this over-simplification of the issue.
If you do nothing, less money goes into the economy, the recession is far deeper, and like during the 1980s recession huge parts of the UK lose out, not for a year or so, but for decades if not forever. Last time it was heavy industry, now it’s probably going to be anything related to housing, banking, and perhaps a little on the Chinese (imports).
The problem has now reached such proportions though that there may no longer be any quick fix. Whoever gets into power next will have to fix these huge structural problems and this will take five to ten years to sort out.
If only people had paid more attention to what the LibDems have been saying for years, the problem may have been caught and prevented much earlier. If only they could be elected to power the problem may last less time before being fixed, too.
Maggie Thatcher’s Tory ideas sowed the seeds for this calamity, and the Labs just went along for the ride because it was so called “established wisdom” and they didn’t want to rock the boat.
The LibDem’s Vince Cable has been warning against this and suggesting we consider rising house prices as part of the inflation index, which would certainly have alerted people to the problem before it grew too big to handle, as it now almost is.
But for some strange reason, people will only flip between one extreme to the other, from the party who laid the foundations of the current problem to the party that didn’t do enough to stop it.
Wow. I always thought he was better than this, but clearly John McCain is a different person altogether – a flip-flopper, a mysogenistic, womanising opportunist who will say whatever he thinks will push his cause (himself) forward the farthest. The article has many quotes from people who worked with him, trained with him, flew with him and were POWs with him. Even his friends were critical. Bad tempered, foul mouthed, self-serving were phrases that often came up in relation to him.
You have to be sorry for Frenchman Sebastian Bourdais, four-times winner of the US Champ Car series and latest victim of the flatulent FIA Stewards’ Ferrari favouritism at Japan’s marvellous Fujiyama circuit.
Bourdais was in a battle for position on the track with Ferrari’s Felipe Massa, who had seriously cocked up his race in Japan with one error after another. Bourdais did everything correctly, he was outside of the pitlane area, he was on the inside of the corner, and was next to the metal barrier on his right side when Massa drove up on his left, and proceeded to try to drive straight through Bourdais as if he didn’t see him as he aimed for the apex of the corner without any regard for the car which was already in that position.
Of course, Massa hit the side of the Toro Rosso and span, losing point scoring places as a result. As Massa slowly made some places up, the TV screen announced that the incident between him and Bourdais would be investigated “after the race.” Meaning when the TV cameras had gone and the potential for bad PR on the main evening news had dissipated and they could work out which penalty to apply to Massa without hurting his World Championship chances.
In the end, they decided to penalise the innocent man who was driven into. There must be some rule giving a more severe penalty to someone receiving their second stop-go penalty in the same race (he had already driven into the side of Hamilton on Lap 1) so they couldn’t give Massa a second drive-through penalty. Because he had finished in 8th, and the 9th placed man (and a few others) were all within a few seconds of him at the finish because of his most un-World Championlike driving the stewards couldn’t give him a penalty because that would mean taking away a single point from him. Never mind they’d already taken a race win away from Lewis Hamilton in Belgium when they last fiddled when Rome was burning. So, they had to blame someone for the accident, and that left Bourdais.
After all, he was clearly at fault because Massa span and Massa never spins! Cough, cough, don’t mention Silverstone or the first two races of 2008… Oh, and of course, Massa doesn’t make mistakes either – it’s not his fault he continually drives into other cars… after all, he is half blind.
Bourdais carried on to finish in a fine 6th, one place ahead of his team mate, Monza winner and latest wunderkind, Sebastian Vettel. But after the penalty, he was demoted to 10th place!
The politics of this are interesting. First of all, Bourdais is French, the only French driver in F1 at the moment, and the FIA offices are in Paris. Ferrari is Italian, and I think most mediterranaean types would not have complained much about Ferrari favouritism from the FIA stewards before, since it was always “Les Anglais, Les Rosbifs” who were being penalised previously. Oh, and Frenchman Jean Todt, erstwhile head of the Ferrari F1 team is rumoured to be being groomed to be the next FIA president after Max Mosley retires next year. Oh yes, and Bourdais has the audacity to have made his name in the US, where F1 has no glowing reputation to uphold to such an extent that they won’t even be going to Canada in 2009 – so they feel safe to treat Bourdais shabbily as they think there will be no come back.
Ferrari, the clowns of Singapore, are clearly continuing to disintegrate and the only question left is will the FIA follow the sinking ship down proclaiming to all and sundry that it was the iceberg’s fault all the while?
PS Spaniard Alonso won. In a French team. What should have been a great news story, is now just an also ran to yet another Ferrari fiddle. Poor Alonso. Poor Bourdais. Poor Formula One.
PPS Is Max Mosley’s man the financial link between Ferrari money and the FIA Stewards‘ Ferrari favouritism?
To anyone who’s been off-planet for the last year, the world is experiencing some turmoil at the moment. financial markets are in chaos, politicians are in panic. Houses, jobs, and savings are being lost. Just when people need to pull together, the failed and failing Republicans enter attack mode, slinging mud, spreading untruths, misinformation, and fear. They offer nothing positive.
McCain looks more and more desperate as he diverts from his previously credible persona into just another weak charactered Republican Attack Dog, looking like he is fearful of losing and greedy for nothing but power and perhaps willing to try fight dirty to ensure he gets it. In the process he is not only nailing his colours to the Bush mast, he is allowing his reputation to be tarnished by the same methods and people responsible for ruining that of President Bush.
I noticed this change just after he had trounced all the more right wing Republican nominees in the race to become the GOP candidate. He won not because he was like them, but because he was different to them. But as soon as the Republican conference was over, his strategy took on a turn for the worse: divisive, negative, aggressive, patronising, weak. Clearly, their money and influence got to him. Fear-mongering took over, as fear can do with weaker personalities.
Then there’s the McCain money scandal in the savings and loan business from the 1980s where his lack of sound judgement as one of the “Keating 5” was made official. Sarah Palin’s many gaffes and her character attacks on anyone who has been taught by or met a certain Illinois Professor over the last 21 years again point to his erratic judgement. He picked her, or at least agreed to have her as his running mate. I can’t help feeling he was manouevred into that one though. Still, he does have a weakness for a pretty face, doesn’t he?
Yet again McCain’s judgement came into question.
Then there’s this sudden morphing from decent guy into greedy millionaire so obsessed with making up for his past mistakes or disclosures in his time in the military that he is willing to sacrifice everything else for it, even at risk to the health of his country.
You no doubt remember his assertion in the First Presidential debate that in order to pay for the recently passed $700bn financial relief package he would cut spending on everything else. But not the military. That would be sacrosanct.
Well, sometimes leadership is not about keeping the things you love, it’s about giving some of them up.
Increasingly, it is clear that McCain and Palin are two one-track ponies: McCain = Military, Palin = Alaska. Isn’t the US a little bit more complex than that?
I’ll close with something less serious though…
…seen first on The Eclectic One. 
