nigel hastilow

Time for a Highland fling

2009-12-07T08:48:00.001-08:00

We gave Scotland the kilt – designed by an Englishman – power and money.

They gave us Tony Blair, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, James Naughtie, Kirsty Wark and the whole McMafia, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland.

Of course they should go it alone. The sooner the better.

The Scottish Nationalists used St Andrew’s Day this week to announce their latest plans for a referendum on independence (St Andrew is, of course, the Patron Saint of Golf).

Unfortunately, it seems the other political parties in the vastly expensive waste of public money that is the Scottish Parliament will block this new bid to destroy the United Kingdom.

But if the Scottish want to go it alone, let them. Actually, we should encourage them.

For every £4 spent by the taxpayer in Scotland – one of the most heavily subsidised regions of the UK – £1 is raised in England. The Scots cost us billions of pounds a year.

The SNP claim if we took into account the revenues from North Sea Oil, that would no longer be the case.

It’s a point of view, though international boundary experts say if you extend the line of the Scottish border into the sea, most of the oilfields lie to the south of it, in England.

Anyway, there is no doubting the pernicious effect Scottish rule has had on the UK over the past decade or more.

Throughout the New Labour years, the Cabinet has been stuffed with Scotsmen. From Tony Blair and Gordon Brown down, the McMafia has been handing out the top jobs to its chums.

Even the last Speaker of the House of Commons, “Gorbals Mick” – sorry, Lord Martin of Springburn – was a Jock.

The Scots dominate the BBC. People like James Naughtie and Kirsty Wark pop up everywhere.

And who dominated the media for most of the last decade? None other than bagpipe-blowing document-sexer Alastair Campbell.

Worst of all, this terrible recession was fashioned and executed in Edinburgh.

Not only cursed with a Scottish Chancellor in Gordon Brown – succeeded, of course, by another one in Alistair Darling – we had a banking system dominated by Edinburgh.

It is one of the most striking features of the banking collapse that the most serious damage was fashioned by the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland.

Bank of Scotland – an historic institution which printed Europe’s first bank notes – had to be bailed out by Lloyds-TSB (two sound, solid banks which originated in Birmingham).

But its poison infected the new group, forcing the Government to step in and prop up the whole rotten edifice. We taxpayers are now into the Bank of Scotland for £23 billion.

That’s nothing, though. RBS, its great rival, has been the most spectacular failure of the lot – even before the latest bonus scandal.

The taxpayer has provided it with loans, cash and guarantees which total a staggering £413.6 billion to keep it from collapse.

This is not the fault of Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin alone. The whole McMafia establishment gloried in the global dominance of Edinburgh’s favourite bank.

Just weeks before the crisis which should have blown away the whole basket-case, Alex Salmond, SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister, was declaring his faith in RBS.

Mr Salmond claimed RBS was “highly profitable and highly successful” and “one of the highest-performing financial institutions in the world”. Eight weeks later, it was dead in the water.

Still, his support and insight should come as no surprise – for most of the 1980s, Mr Salmond worked for RBS as an economist.

How Scotland would have survived the last 12 months without being bailed out by the English, Welsh and Northern Irish taxpayers is impossible to imagine.

It would be in the same bankruptcy boat as Iceland.

Independence would force Scotland to raise its own taxes. But as the UK Government spends £9,538 per head per year in Scotland and only £7,971 in England, taxes would have to rise by 20 per cent north of Hadrian’s Wall.

This massive subsidy explains why Scotland can afford to scrap university tuition fees (for everyone in Europe except the English), axe prescription charges, give free care to the elderly and freeze council taxes.

It’s helped along by the fact that Scotland, despite its own costly Parliament, has at least 13 too many MPs at Westminster.

A Scottish MP represents 54,569 voters; an English one has an electorate of 68,626. The smallest seat is the Western Isles (now called the unpronounceable Na h-Eileanan an Iar) with a mere 22,200 voters.

Over the years, Unionists have tried to appease the Scots with money, jobs and political clout.

Cannily enough, the Scots chunter about how terrible it is being ruled by Westminster but they’ll never put their money where their mouth is and vote for independence. They know which side their haggis is buttered.

It may take two to tango but only one for a Highland Fling. The English should be offered a referendum on whether we want to fling out Scotland.

It’s a welfare State sponging off the rest of us. It's time to say farewell.

Busy doing nothing

2009-12-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

It comes as no surprise to encounter bureaucracy, delay and incompetence within the myriad quangos which now rule our lives. But the Environment Agency deserves star prize for procrastination, obfuscation and disinformation.

At the start of this year, an agency road-show toured the villages from Broadway to Badsey setting out detailed plans for flood alleviation along Badsey Brook following the inundation of 2007. We were told more than once that work would definitely start in the late summer of this year and be completed by next spring. We were also told that the funding was already in place.

Since then, the only money spent on Badsey Brook has been the replacement of a couple of footbridges and the re-pointing of some brickwork. The money for this apparently came from some flood relief fund or other but has done no good for man nor beast.

Meanwhile, we have now been informed that the time-scale set out at the start of this year for real flood alleviation work has now “slipped” – a euphemism our bureaucrats delight in using when they mean they can’t be bothered to act fast enough.

Instead of starting work in August, as it promised, the agency has had the nerve to appoint outside consultants – at an unknown cost to the taxpayer – to come up with a flood alleviation scheme. This is despite the fact that during its road-show at the start of the year, the agency set out plainly a scheme which its own experts claimed would cut the risk of flooding to once in a thousand years (the sort of floods seen recently in Cumbria).

Appointing consultants is a marvellous delaying tactic beloved of bureaucrats, whose aim is always to kick it into the long grass and blame someone else. It now seems work will not start until later next year, if we’re lucky, it might possibly get completed some time late in 2011.

Why this unacceptable delay? Nobody seems to know.

Instead of actually doing something practical, the Agency is sending out newsletters announcing that it plans to check out various natural habitats along the brook and advising landowners against clearing riverbank growth and debris because that will simply make flooding worse.

Rather than bird-watching, these pettifogging fools might like to inspect the brook instead. If they did, they would find that landowners have already scraped the riverbanks clean to accelerate the water flow – contrary to the agency’s advice – but only, it is fair to assume, because they were suckered by the assurances given at the start of 2009 that work would commence on the flood alleviation scheme a few months later.

I am deeply disappointed that our local councillor, Liz Eyre, seems prepared to put up with all this and I appeal to our MP, Peter Luff, to see if he can do something.

I doubt if he will succeed because, of course, the agency is answerable to nobody and can do what it likes, when it feels like it.

Residents throughout the Vale of Evesham were promised prompt action after the 2007 floods by the Environment Agency and the district council. I very much hope their abject failure in relation to Badsey Brook is not symptomatic of a more widespread malaise, though I fear it probably is.

I’ve sent this to the Evesham Journal. Meanwhile I have had a letter from my local councillor:

I have ensured about 50 people will have the information by mis week and the EA has a list which should include all 250 residents plus 30 -40 councillors plus several stakeholder community groups. I am sure by the weekend the newsletter will be very well distributed.

It could be helpful for communications to advise the Evesham News but they wil pick it up at the Parish Meetings anyway.

Bearing in mind Charlton (25 houses flooded ) have not yet got approval for flooding through the Levy Board - which is step one and Broadway /Childswickham/Wickhamford and Murcot have I am pleased things are moving on. The work to get Charlton to stage one has been significant involving myself, the parish, residents, fundraising by residents and the local MP's involvement and we are still not yet there with another hoop to jump through next January - other projects in the Country are higher priority.

As a County and District Councillor who deals with major Capital projects: schools, flood defences, roads and bridge building etc all the time I have perhaps a much clearer graps of who has responsibility for which part of the agenda, how different organisations have to jump through the hoops of the legislation coming from Brussells and Whitehall - the environmental work etc and just how much progress and work is going on. As most Parish Councillors will confirm the professional chaps have been out and about all summer, in the three villages, doing their work necessary to make this happen.

As an accountant with strong management experience in the private sector I also understand how if it was my money or my companies' money I would want a solid engineering solution, properly worked up and researched. I would want technical feasibility to be as good as it could be, I would want environmental sustainability to be within the law ( though I do think we have too many requirements that put humans at the back of the pecking order compared with crested newts) and I would want the scheme to be financially viable.

We are currently building 150 million pounds worth of schools ( 5 secondary schools) in the Wyre Foerest - they too have to go through the same steps - money is allocated, consultation is done, plans are drawn up, changes are made, environmental impact statements are done, strategies are prepared to show that it will make a transformational difference, then work is done on sites, then planning is applied for , then and only then is a buisness case put to the treasury to sign off on the money finally.

as for time scale - the slipage was reported to the Parish by the EA quite some time ago.

I won't defend the EA's poor communications record or the slight glitch in progress for one month in the summer but I do belive your comment about incompetence and bureaucracy are based on a lack of understanding or all that is needed for a very technical project such as this involving landowner negotiations, modelling, planning, environmental requirements etc.

I am still worried about too much modelling is going on in darkened rooms with not enough local knowledge but I can press for this as we move forward.

The District Council has no responsibility for the Badsey Brook - this is the responsibility of the EA a governement department

The County Council is the same

We work in partnership to get landowners to clear ditches and improve water courses but the EA is the responsibly body for this Brook and its flooding

Should all three authorities have separate areas of responsibility - NO it is not joined up enough. Is something happening about that - YES

The new Bill going through Parliament based on the Pitt Report will correct and put all through one body The County Council - then you could aim your grievance at us - however - will the Bill pass through before the break up of Parliament - who knows?

Will there be more money for County Coucils to do this job - no highly unlikey - more responsibility without funds to do.

I know how busy you are but I am always willing to have a chat in the Sandy's Arms or after a Parish Council meeting on how and why capital projects take so long.

The 5 schools I mentioned will be completed 2012/4

I do hope in some way this put the EA's several million dollar projects in our area in context . There are hundreds of similar projects form 2007 in the Country - in Sheffiled, the Marches, Wales - we have to keep ours on track but appreciate with such a low number of houses affected we have hit the right response through strong County and District lobbying.

There are many things still to be worried about and to lobby for with this proposed project but I am unable to complain as to length and amount of progress as I understand how long the work takes and what is involved.

Regards Liz

Sexing up the weather

2009-11-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

After the filthy weather of the past week and the terrible flooding in Cumbria, it’s difficult to stay a climate-change denier.

We deniers take the perverse view that if almost the entire scientific and political establishment are ganging up together to blame mankind for global warming then they must be wrong.

We assume this is a conspiracy to make us all feel terribly guilty for taking summer holidays, driving cars and wasting water.

And we are suspicious that it all boils down to a demand for higher taxes and more State interference.

Global warming is today’s Armageddon. A few years ago it was the New Ice Age. Before that, nuclear holocaust.

Activists always need some excuse to parade up and down the streets with their “The End Of The World Is Nigh” sandwich boards.

But when you see towns like Cockermouth inundated by a once-in-a-thousand-years flood, it’s tough to remain sceptical.

We’re told the world is getting hotter, it’s all our fault and it can only be stopped if we change our ways.

The deniers – treated by the meteorological establishment as if they were denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps – are accused of flying in the face of the evidence.

And, as evidence goes, one foot of rain in 24 hours is pretty conclusive.

But if the world is heating up so fast and we’re all doomed, why are our political leaders doing so little about it?

Soon they will be attending a ten-day climate-change junket in Copenhagen.

They will discuss cutting CO2 emissions and talk impressively about the serious threats facing humanity.

When they get back home, they will do next to nothing to make voters change their ways.

No politician wants to be the first to close down his country’s airports, tax cars off the roads or shut coal-fired power stations.

If they truly believe we face the calamities predicted by the environment lobby, they would act before it’s too late.

Indeed, I have more sympathy for the militant eco-warriors who turn up to such gatherings making a nuisance of themselves than I do with the people inside the conference chambers.

If I believed the climate-change rhetoric, I’d be protesting about the lack of progress, too.

After all, it’s easy for today’s political leaders to faff around setting targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases by 2050 because most of them won’t be around that long.

Even the sainted US President Barak Obama is playing the live-now, pay-later game. He is pledging to cut CO2 emissions in America by 17 per cent. By 2020.

Even if Obama serves two terms in the White House, he will be off selling his memoirs by 2020 and blaming someone else for missing the target.

St Augustine once prayed: “Oh Lord, give me chastity, but do not give it yet.”

The world’s leaders say much the same thing: “Oh Lord, give me a clean environment, but do not give it yet.”

So heavy rain is not the devastating proof of global warming that it appears to be.

Even weathermen admit they cannot demonstrate beyond all doubt that the floods were caused by excess man-made CO2 emissions.

And, let’s face it, we’ve known wet weather before – over hundreds of years.

All over the country there are notches on buildings near the rivers marking the height of floods in the 1800s. There was no talk of climate change when Queen Victoria was on the Throne.

Worse still for the eco-warriors, scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit stand accused of covering up evidence which undermined their claims.

A series of leaked e-mails show they have been caught out trying to suppress evidence that the globe has not actually warmed over the last ten years.

In fact, it’s cooled, which is somewhat embarrassing if you have built your whole career and reputation on the threat to mankind of our hot-house atmosphere.

Still, the Met Office is riding to the rescue with its latest forecast. The organisation – an arm of the Ministry of Defence, let’s not forget – says the next decade will include five of the hottest years on record.

In half of the next 10 years, average temperatures will be higher than those seen in 1998, the warmest year on record, according to the weathermen.

They also claim 2009 is on course to go straight into the “hot one hundred” at number five. The weathermen warn of more floods in the coming years and, when it’s not raining, droughts.

This is, of course, the same Met Office which promised temperatures this year would be so high we would all enjoy a “barbecue summer”.

You will recall it rained. All the time.

The suspicion now is the Met Office decided to “sex up” its forecast because Ministers wanted us to holiday at home this summer to boost the flagging economy.

But if we even think scientists and weathermen peddle disinformation, we won’t trust their dire warnings.

Which is why most people are still highly sceptical about the whole scam – and why politicians don’t take them too seriously. Even when it’s bucketing down.

Shelley in Dubai

2009-11-29T02:25:00.000-08:00

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away"

Ho! Ho! Ho! It's snow joke

2009-11-24T05:13:00.000-08:00

“Harriet Harman cancels Christmas.” It hasn’t happened yet but it could if she gets her way.

Our grim, prim, joyless Deputy Prime Minister and self-appointed equality-campaigner-in-chief has such a Puritanical mindset she would frighten even the campest fairy from the top of a Christmas tree.

Ms Harperson has not actually proposed to ban Christmas. But that may well be the unintended consequence of her latest attempt to force everyone to be equal.

The warning comes from Monsignor Andrew Summersgill, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference.

He fears the Stasi-like policing of Britain’s equality laws is so humourless and politically correct that local councils and other public bodies will soon abandon attempts to celebrate the Birth of Christ.

They will be so terrified of offending non-Christians, given the demands of Ms Harperson’s latest Equalities Bill, that trees, carols, decorations, the very name Christmas could be banished from sight.

This is all absurd scaremongering, Ms Harperson’s spokespeople tell us reassuringly.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? There aren’t many votes in cancelling Christmas – even among non-Christians, most of whom enjoy the festive season as much as the average Christian.

These denials should not be trusted, however. We have experience of councils that cancel Christmas. Remember Birmingham’s attempt a few years ago to create “Winterval” instead?

It made the city an international laughing-stock but that hasn’t stopped other places following the trend. The City of Oxford, of all places, re-named Christmas “Winter Light Festival” to make it more inclusive.

In a letter to MPs, Monsignor Summersgill warns: “Under existing legislation, we have seen the development of a risk-averse culture with outcomes as ridiculous as reports of a local authority instructing tenants to take down Christmas lights in case they might offend Muslim neighbours, or of authorities removing the word Christmas out of cultural sensitivity to everyone except Christians.

“If this Bill is serious about equality, everything possible must be done to avoid it having a chilling effect on religious expression and practice.”

This is still a Christian country. Yet our governors are apparently so ashamed of it they do all they can to avoid mentioning it.

We are so terribly polite and British we are terrified of upsetting anyone or causing a scene.

So instead of enjoying equality, we bend over backwards to be “inclusive”.
Our lords and masters would much prefer we “celebrate diversity” than celebrate Christmas.

The whole apparatus of the State is geared to this. From the BBC to local authorities, the idea that the people of Britain have a culture of their own – let alone a religious faith – is rubbished and undermined at every opportunity.

The cancellation of Christmas is a logical consequence of this politically-correct thinking. There was something revealing about the way the Government denied the suggestion that Ms Harperson’s Bill would kill off Christmas.

A spokesperson for the Equalities Office, a branch of Government I’d never actually heard of before, said it was ridiculous to think the Bill would affect Christmas.
He said: “Of course local councils can still put up Christmas tree lights or mark any other religious ceremony such as Diwali, Eid or Ramadan.”

In his mind, it seems, there is no difference between Christmas, Diwali, Eid and Ramadan. They are all religious festivals and may – perhaps should – be given equal treatment by local councils.

Is that a reasonable view? While few people would complain about the public celebration of Diwali, Eid or Ramadan, in this country they surely rank as less important events in the calendar than Christmas.

Or maybe they don’t any more. Maybe the importance of “inclusiveness” and “celebrating diversity” is so great that we must abandon the idea that this is a Christian country at all.

The trouble with “equality” campaigners is that, in their crusade to be “inclusive”, they ignore the majority and devote all their time and attention to minorities.

This is all very British – up to a point. But there is a difference between treating all peoples equally and assuming – without any evidence – that Christianity is so offensive to others that it must be hidden away, downgraded or abolished.

One of the more scandalous recent acts by the European Court of Human Rights is to ban the display of Crucifixes in Italian schools.

This is a stunning display of cultural nihilism – an attempt, by edict, to wipe out and destroy the cultural and religious heritage of an entire country.

It’s the sort of State brutality you would usually associate with Stalin or Communist China.

In the week when they appointed the first President of Europe, confirming the creation of the world’s first “stealth superstate”, we have much to be afraid of.

We have been sucked into the belly of the monster without ever a word of protest.
It won’t take long before Europe’s courts turn their attention to other signs of Western religious culture.

If Harriet Harman’s new laws don’t kill of Christmas, the EU probably will. We’d better enjoy this Christmas, we may not have many of them left to look forward to.

Up Holland - actually, up yours too

2009-11-20T01:18:00.001-08:00

Baroness Who? If the EU really wanted to downplay the creation of a new President and Foreign Secretary it couldn’t have done much better than give the top job to a Belgian and the other to an obscure Baroness from Britain.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland (where?) is an ex-CND campaigner with a degree in sociology and all the right contacts, being married to the political pundit and Yougov polling pioneer Peter Kellner.

Her new boss is possibly even more obscure. The EU leaders passed over Tony Blair – a decision we can all be grateful for – even though he was, as David Milliband said, the only candidate capable of “stopping the traffic” thanks to his worldwide notoriety.

Instead they have chosen the Prime Minister of Belgium, one Herman van Rompuy. No doubt in future when we are asked to name five famous Belgians (always tricky especially if TinTin doesn’t count) we may recall old Rumpy-pumpy.

But the truth is that rather than choose a “traffic-stopper” as the first President of Europe, the leaders have gone for a “traffic warden” instead.

And with Baroness Ashton of Upholland at his side, it’s clear the leaders of the EU are doing their best to hide the truth from us – the truth being that they have just created the world’s newest superstate.

They may have chosen political pygmies over the international disaster that would have been President Blair, but the fact remains they have now completed their bloodless – and referendum-less – political power-grab.

Baroness Ashton is a perfect example of the EU’s complete abandonment of any idea of democracy.

She has risen without trace from the ranks of the ban-the-bombers to become a Peer, a Minister, an EU Commissioner and now the EU’s first “High Representative for Foreign Affairs”.

At no point in her long and lack-lustre career has she ever stood for elected office. Not once.

Yet thanks to our supposedly democratic system of politics, she has now been elevated to what could arguably be described as the second most powerful position in the whole of Europe.

She may be a reasonably competent administrator and politician. Her success may owe as much to her talents as to her party allegiance and her contacts.

But the fact remains that this woman has never been put into any job as a result of a popular election. The nearest she has ever come to winning a vote was when the leaders of the 27 satellite states which make up the European Union had dinner, a chat and a vote of sorts over whether she should get the job.

The fact that the agreement was apparently unanimous suggests even this was scarcely democratic. It was much more about doing a deal, stitching up Tony Blair and throwing a few scraps to Gordon Brown than it was about the Baroness’s talents.
Despite the total absence of democratic accountability, Baroness Ashton and Herman Rumpy-pumpy will now set about imposing their will on the rest of us.

They can go to war, they can run down the Union Flag and run up the gold stars, they can ban “God Save the Queen” and impose a bastardised version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

This is a depressing day for anyone who still cherishes national sovereignty. The only consolation is that it’s probably depressing for Tony Blair too.

Read a Dutch view on how the United States of Europe is planning to destroy our privacy.

Meet the Simpsons

2009-11-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

Spot the difference.

Once Tony Blair’s favourite industrialist, Lord Simpson has a lot to answer for. Years after he destroyed GEC-Marconi, his malign influence still haunts West Midlands industry.

This week, one of the last shreds of Lord Simpson’s empire was destroyed when Ericsson announced the closure of its brand new, £30 million research and development site at Ansty, Coventry.

Gordon Brown only visited it in February when everyone hailed the development as the cornerstone of a £300 million technology park.

But the truth is they’ve been trying to breathe life into Ansty since 2001 when Marconi said it was building a new head office there creating 2,200 jobs.

This was a mirage, an illusion, a joke played on us by the impresario of business disaster, Lord Simpson of Dunkeld (yes, another Scot at the heart of our financial meltdown).

Then plain Mr George Simpson, he ousted Lord Weinstock as boss of GEC in 1996.

Lord Weinstock built one of the most successful business in the country. Mr Simpson re-named it Marconi, got his peerage and destroyed the company in the space of five years.

The disintegration of British industry is one of the tragedies of our age. The recession has much to answer for but it’s not the only reason for the disappearance of good companies offering good jobs.

Blame has to be laid at the door of people like Lord Simpson, who was ennobled at the time when New Labour and our best-paid industrialists conducted their nauseating love affair.

When Mr Simpson took over at GEC, he had a company worth £10 billion with £3 billion cash in the bank.

By 2001, the year before he died, Lord Weinstock saw his company destroyed. When Lord Simpson was forced out, the shares, once worth £12.50, had fallen to four pence each.

It was one of the most catastrophic company collapses in British history.

But in British industry, nothing succeeds like failure. George Simpson’s CV reads like a roll call of great West Midland business fiascos.

He ran Leyland-DAF and Austin-Rover. After the car-maker was flogged to British Aerospace, he palmed it off onto BMW. Then he became Chief Executive of Lucas Industries.

Lucas was another famous Birmingham name. When Lord Simpson became boss, it employed 46,000 people. He offloaded it to new American owners. The company fell apart though bits of it live on in different guises.

By then, our hero had moved on again and was setting about GEC. He went on a buying spree, clambered aboard the dot-com bandwagon and saw Marconi’s value collapse by £33 billion.

The Ericsson telecommunications research and development work at Ansty was one of the last remnants of Lord Weinstock’s empire.

Lord Simpson has no direct responsibility for this week’s decision. But he was one of those industrialists more interested in buying and selling businesses than in developing them.

Takeovers, mergers and deals are what keep moneymen in luxury yachts. They need predators and victims.

Shareholders are all that stand between this corporate cash-and-carry culture and the survival of British industry.

What happened at Austin-Rover, Lucas and GEC-Marconi is not part of some “inevitable consolidation in a competitive global economy”. It’s the result of bad deals done for the worst reasons.

Even as Ericsson abandon Coventry, American junk-food giants Kraft are renewing their bid for Cadbury. This is another disaster in the making.

I agree with the unions. Unite’s Peter Skyte complains: “Successive governments have maintained the illusion that the country of ownership of a company is immaterial.

“The decision by Ericsson to close the Ansty site shatters this illusion, throws highly skilled workers out of work, and robs the UK of key technological development vital for its future.”

Ericsson is a Swedish company. When the going gets tough, which jobs will they protect first – jobs in Coventry or in Stockholm?

You can’t blame them. The tragedy is that British companies don’t think like that any more – and, even if they did, there are so few of them left it wouldn’t make much difference anyway.

The other day I met one of the country’s most influential economists. He was asked what the Government should do to protect British manufacturing.

His answer was deeply depressing. They don’t call economics “the dismal science” for nothing.
He said we should leave that sort of thing to the emerging economies of Asia, the Far East and South America.

We couldn’t compete so there was nothing we could do about it, he said.

Despite his eminence, I think he’s wrong. We desperately need successful manufacturing businesses. To get and keep them, we need industrialists who aren’t seduced by the next easy deal.

Lord Weinstock was often attacked for not splashing his cash and, instead, simply providing shareholders with a safe, sound return on their investment.

He told his accusers: "I don't approve of raising money to plunder other companies."

It’s a pity Lord Simpson learned nothing from his predecessor.

Still, no doubt the good Lord subscribes to the family philosophy: “You can’t keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once and move on.”

Who said that? Another Simpson. Homer. Doh!

Osborne promises tax break for new businesses

2009-11-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has promised tax breaks for new businesses and a simpler tax system to end the need for elaborate avoidance schemes.

Mr Osborne and David Willetts, the Shadow Higher Education Secretary, were speaking to business leaders and students at Birmingham Metropolitan College.

This is some of what they said:

George Osborne

Government has to face the fact that the economy is in a weak state. Britain is now pretty well the last major economy in the world still in recession. How do we get credit moving again, businesses are still struggling with credit? There’s a chronic lack of confidence, lack of foreign investment in the UK. We have to be honest about these problems and talk openly about how we address them.

The banking system is a source of enormous frustration to everyone. We have provided a trillion pounds of grants, support and liquidity and the banking system remains incredibly fragile. A bank like RBS has a balance sheet bigger than Britain’s GDP. Dealing with the system remains a massive challenge. We have to have a better regulated system which requires change, putting that famous supporter of Aston Villa, the Governor of the Bank of England (Mervyn King), in charge of regulation.

Britain needs successful financial services but we have got to protect the taxpayer when things go wrong. It can’t be ‘heads they win, tails we lose’.

The second problem is the budget deficit. It is around £175 billion this year. It represents a quarter of all public spending. One in every £4 spent by the Government has to be borrowed from the rest of the world.

One of the reasons we are still in recession is there is a lack of sense on how to deal with this problem. We are like a family that’s spending too much. Just as you have these agonising meetings when you sit down with your husband or wife and go through the things you are going to cut back on, we as a country are going to have that conversation.

We need to get the country working again. We need to send a very clear signal that this country is open again. Unemployment in Birmingham is now over 12 per cent and over 30 per cent in some parts.

It’s also about trying to encourage businesses. A new business will not pay tax on the first ten people it employs.

We have an unbalanced economy and we are paying the price for that imbalance. Too much of the growth is in London and the South. We need a more regionally balanced economy. That means supporting manufacturing, transport infrastructure.

On Global Warming:

The overwhelming body of scientific evidence suggests it is happening but even if you do not believe it is happening, that it is man-made and that it will have bad consequences for the world, you would surely accept we have to protect our energy security.

Oil and gas come from some of the most politically unstable places in the world Britain should be trying to improve its energy efficiency, find other sources of energy, should be making use of its resources. We would be doing these things also to try and save costs and a time when all business and the Government are struggling. There’s a massive market out there for Britain in new energy technology. Green energy technology is where a lot of the investment in the world is going now.

Poverty

Between 10 and 20 per cent of the people in this country, in good times and in bad, have been entirely left behind. Five and a half million people are on permanent out-of-work benefit. There has been a huge focus of our policy-making on how you help them. There are people in our country who pay 96 per cent tax – very low-income people because for every £1 they earn they have 96 pence taken away in benefit withdrawal. There are now 900,000 people in more entrenched poverty than there were ten years ago.

Tax avoidance

I would like a good HMRC that’s effective in spotting tax avoidance and dealing with it. We need a system with fewer exemptions and reliefs and is, broadly-speaking, simple and has lower rates, that’s very neutral and doesn’t present opportunities for tax avoidance. Governments have to be aware of the consequences. They make Capital Gains Tax 18 per cent and personal income tax 50 per cent but if you can present income as a capital gain there are problems. There are thousands of people working out how to transfer from the 50 per cent rate to the 18 per cent rate. Complexity leads to avoidance. I think the answer is a simpler system and lower tax rates and that’s the best weapon in tax avoidance.

Business rates review

Told of a newsagent whose bill is due to rise from £8,000 to £18,000 a year, Mr Osborne said:

It’s not doing what we were told it would and as potentially increasing substantially the tax on small businesses. The first thing we will do is try and get the Government to change its approach.

David Willetts

Pledged 10,000 extra university places next year plus more money for apprenticeships.

We think they help ensure that, as we emerge from this terrible recession, we have a better-qualified workforce, more opportunities for young people and a better balanced economy.

What we are talking about isn’t just skills for the next year, you are talking about infrastructure for the next generation. We haven’t been investing enough in the capital we need for a modern, efficient economy. We completely understand that, as part of a better performing British economy, we have to have the infrastructure they have in France and Germany and even in America

Asked about the cancellation of a building scheme at the college, he said: If we are smart we can make these projects go ahead. Colleges are very restricted in the deals they can do with external lenders who provide them with the finance. By giving colleges greater freedom to do deals with local businesses. What really matters is that you get an opportunity for training and education which is as good as the competition are getting in India and China. You are entitled to the same standard if not better.

On student fees, he said: There is frustration as they have not seen what the fees have done to improve their education experience. The only justification for changing fees for students is if it improves the experience of students. That’s what the money is supposed to go for, to make it worthwhile being a student.

Lies, damned lies and weather forecasts

2009-11-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

It could be an urban myth or it may have been bigged-up in the re-telling but I now have it on good authority (a friend of a friend of a man at the Met Office) that my suspicions about last summer’s weather forecast were actually true (see previous blog). http://nigelhastilow.blogspot.com/2009/07/met-office-spinning-for-britain.html

The Met Office belongs to the Ministry of Defence and is not, therefore, an entirely reliable source of information at the best of times.

In the worst of times – last February as the recession was still plunging to its nadir – the Government was naturally looking for something to cheer us all up.

According to my friend of a friend of a man at the Met Office, they hit on a long-range weather forecast which would persuade us to holiday at home in the summer of 2009.

Ministers reasoned, apparently, that the promise of a long, hot summer would convince holidaymakers to stay at home this year.

This, in turn, would boost the domestic tourist industry and ensure that at least some more businesses survived the ravages of recession.

So it proved. This summer, the word “staycation” entered the lexicon. It may be just because we’re all so poor, and the pound’s so weak, we couldn’t afford to go further afield.

But the promise of warm days and balmy nights must have played a part in the decision-making process. It must also have cheered us all up a bit.

As it turned out, the Met Office was wrong. Hideously wrong. As it usually is.

We’ve grown to accept their multi-million pound inaccuracies in much the same way as we laugh off the promises and warnings of our daily horoscopes. Just occasionally you can read something into them which may fit in with our persona circumstances and then we say how fantastic they are.

More often than not, however, we know today’s prognostications for our star sign are utter nonsense. And that’s pretty much what happens with Met Office weather forecasts.

So we’ve laughed off its abysmal failure to predict a wet summer as just another example of its ineptitude.

Suppose, though, that the friend of a friend of a man at the Met Office is right. Suppose the Government did manipulate the weather forecast for its own ends.

Nobody could tell and, doubtless, the scientists would justify their craven behaviour on the grounds that any forecast includes so many elements of doubt and uncertainty that nobody could prove beyond peradventure that their promises were falsified.

They would tell themselves that, actually, there really was – statistically speaking – a good chance of a long, hot summer. They would say global warming made it likely.

Plus the washout we had in 2008. Plus it’s what happened in, say, 1785 and therefore the pattern suggests it will happen again any decade now.

I was tempted to call the Met Office and put this allegation to them. But there’s no point. They would deny it and point to all the probabilities and likelihoods and insist their forecasts are within acceptable margins of error.

And I doubt if there’s a smoking gun – or perhaps a soggy e-mail – to prove the political pressure to promise good weather.

So the allegation of manipulation for economic and political purposes will remain just that – an unprovable allegation.

In Communist China – still a repressive totalitarian regime, by the way – they are not above seeding the sky to make sure their military parades take place on sunny afternoons. They even have a Beijing Weather Modification Office in charge of making it rain when they need more water (it’s not terribly successful, by all accounts).

So, if some nations actually try to manipulate the weather itself, there’s every chance our own Government is not above manipulating the forecasts. Why wouldn’t they, especially when the Met Office is so unreliable that nobody can rely on a word it says anyway?

Democracy inaction

2009-11-09T02:00:00.000-08:00

Brum plans 30 per cent spending cuts

Never let it be said that public spending cuts are painless. I hear Birmingham City Council is proposing drastic spending reductions in various departments. In some cases this will be as much as 30 per cent of the existing budget.

How will that play at election time when the councillors and their Conservative Parliamentary candidates are up for election and facing the full fury of the unions?

Wycombe wanderers

I hear that David Cameron’s centrally-imposed candidates’ shortlists are not going down well in the provinces. Never mind the “turnip Taliban”, I’m told that in one recent selection meeting, “the woman on the shortlist wouldn’t have got anywhere near selection” had she not been a member of the fair sex.

Likewise, there is much gnashing of teeth in CCHQ that the selection of a local, and a man, for the safe seat of Wycombe. Steve Baker slipped through the net, much to the fury of the party high command. Of course, they will say they are delighted, have every confidence, blah blah blah but the truth is distinctly otherwise.

Solihull goes off piste

Get a new flier through the letterbox from David Cameron urging me to give more money to the party to boost the chances of election victory. It includes a map of Britain and a list of target seats.

Embarrassingly for Maggie Throup, the candidate for Solihull, this map tells us that the constituency is already safely in Conservative Party control. This will come as a surprise to the woman who beat John Taylor at the last election, Liberal Democrat MP Lorely Burt. Mind you, I notice that the seat doesn’t rate a mention on the ConservativeHome website either. Is it possible that is where CCHQ gleans its information?

Cash and questions

Disgruntled Bromsgrove Conservatives are none the wiser following last week’s hardly shock news that Julie Kirkbride doesn’t want to resign after all.

The “expenses queen” has been assiduously re-cultivating her contacts for several months now and her attendance at last week’s executive committee meeting – not advertised in advance to the people who were turning up – came as a surprise to some, though it shouldn’t have.

The real issues now are: If there is to be a £40,000 postal ballot primary for the selection of a candidate, how many names will be on the ballot paper? Will Julie have to take her chances alongside several others people at the interview stage? Or will the question be simply, “Do you want Julie Kirkbride? Yes or No?”

Most concerning of all is the question: Who pays the £40,000?

The locals do not think the money they raise from raffles and lunch parties should be channelled into a mightily expensive PR exercise to promote Julie as the “comeback queen”. So that suggests the money will come from CCHQ which is fine, in theory, with the locals. But is it a good use of that money?

Admittedly, now the rich and very rich can see the way the wind is blowing, the Conservatives’ coffers are overflowing with cash, but even so, forty grand is still forty grant. It’s enough to keep the average MP in duck houses for several months.

It works for Julie

2009-11-06T05:15:00.000-08:00

So the Bromsgrove Conservatives are willing to let Julie Kirkbride stand again as their Parliamentary candidate despite her outstanding position in the MPs’ expenses furore. There will be a lot of disappointed Tory wannabes.

Still, I don’t suppose for one minute all this local support has anything to do with the fact that the association’s chairman’s wife and his daughter both work for her.

Silk and cyanide

2009-11-05T11:06:00.001-08:00

Have you ever tried buying a railway ticket for someone else, a teenager maybe, who has no money but wants to visit you?

Because if you have, you are probably bald by now having torn out most of your hair.

Teenagers have two particular traits which are enough to drive older relatives and friends to drink – they leave everything to the last minute and they never have any money.

That was the case when my nephew announced that, while he would love to visit us, he didn’t have the money for a train fare from Oxford to Birmingham.

Typical, I thought, especially as he didn’t make this announcement until the night before he was due to arrive.

So how to help him? Surely we could book a ticket for him. I called National Train Enquiries to discover it’s not that simple. Indeed, it’s so complicated you wonder if the railway system is designed to deter passengers.

I cannot be the first person ever in the history of rail travel to want to buy a ticket on behalf of someone else, can I? It seems as if I must be.

I thought maybe I could offer to pay for it over the phone, on my credit card, and my nephew could pick up the ticket at Oxford station the following morning.

But no, that won’t work. Apparently, in order to obtain the ticket, he would need to show the credit card it had been bought with – something he obviously couldn’t do because I had bought it. With my credit card. From my home not from Oxford station.

There was one other option, I was grudgingly informed. If my nephew presented himself at the station in Oxford and I presented myself at the booking office in Birmingham, I could avail myself of what is apparently called “the silk arrangement”.

I’d almost lost the will to live by this point, so I didn’t bother to ask why it was called “the silk arrangement” – certainly it’s not because the arrangement is as smooth as silk.

If I were to tell the booking office person that my nephew wished to buy a ticket from Oxford to Birmingham, the office in Brum would telephone the office in Oxford and the transaction could take place.

My nephew could ask for his ticket. The booking office in Oxford could ask for its £50 – fifty pounds! It’s outrageous – and the office in Birmingham could take payment from me, confirm receipt of my hard-earned money and the people in Oxford might finally offer my nephew a valid ticket.

Of course, this is such a rare and unusual event, so uncommon, one that puts our railway system to so much trouble, that they think it’s only fair we pay an additional £10 for the privilege of availing ourselves of “the silk arrangement”.

I wondered if I couldn’t simply wait until my nephew arrived at the Oxford booking office and telephone the place myself, from the comfort of my own home or wherever, rather than having to turn up at New Street Station a couple of hours before he was due to arrive.

If they’d only give me the phone number of the Oxford booking office, I needn’t trouble the Birmingham people at all, I suggested.

I must be joking, I was told. They couldn’t go giving out the phone numbers of railway stations up and down the country. What was I thinking of?

“No-one is allowed to give out any station phone number in the UK due to security reasons,” I was informed.

“If you start giving out train station phone numbers people will start making bomb threats and the whole rail network will collapse completely.”

Then he added the clincher: “And when the whole rail network collapses, there’s no chance whatsoever of your nephew getting a train from Oxford to Birmingham.”

“That,” the National Train Enquiries man told me with an air of triumph, “Is why you can’t start giving out train station numbers.”

Well I suppose he must have a point. Imagine how much mayhem could be caused by a hoax bomb call to Oxford station.

I suppose any self-respecting hoax terrorist wouldn’t simply phone National Train Enquiries and issue a hoax to them instead. Maybe National Train Enquiries would ignore it whereas the good folk in Oxford would take it seriously.

Anyway, it may well be that National Train Enquiries have a better understanding of the hoax-terrorist mentality than the rest of us, so we must respect their concerns.

That still leaves my nephew in Oxford and me with no way of getting him to Birmingham that doesn’t involve considerable inconvenience to yours truly.

It would be easier, cheaper and more comfortable if I simply drove to Oxford, picked him up and drove home again. No hidden surcharges, no to-ing and fro-ing between railway station booking offices, and change from £60.

It’s not all the railways’ fault. He should have had some money or have arranged, in advance, for me to transfer some into his bank account (assuming it wouldn’t simply get swallowed up by his overdraft).

But surely the railway system has had to deal with stranded, penniless passengers in the past and divined some method of getting them to their destinations while allowing someone else to pay the fare.

I discovered later, via the internet, that First Great Western’s “Silk Arrangement for a stranded passenger must be done at a station or via our Aftersales Team on 08457 000 125. Please note that only Standard Open Single tickets may be purchased in this event and a £10 administration fee will apply.”

So you don’t have to present yourself at a railway station after all. Pity they don’t know that at National Rail Enquiries or does this only apply to First Great Western? Who knows?

Why “silk”? Can’t find out. My guess is it stands for something like “Stranded In Location, Knackered.”

If it's good enough for Boris....

2009-10-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Cripes! Crikey! I say old chap! It looks as if Boris Johnson is turning into Ken Livingstone.

Forcing local Tory associations to take the candidate imposed on them by Conservative Party headquarters is one thing.

But forcing everywhere north of Watford to do without a regional development agency while protecting London’s is something else entirely.

The internal politics of the Conservative Party only matters to the activists.

The central control of candidates – including the imposition of all-women shortlists in safe seats – is bizarre given that David Cameron claims to support “localism” and wants to devolve power.

But this little local difficulty pales into insignificance beside the news that the next Conservative Government plans to axe every development agency but London’s.

This crass piece of centralisation ought to infuriate just about everyone. Love development agencies or loathe them, there is absolutely no sense whatsoever in keeping London’s and getting rid of the rest.

Of all the places in Britain which needs a development agency the least, it is London.

Our capital city already enjoys the best of everything – public spending included. It has the jobs, the Head Offices, the foreign investment, the transport infrastructure, the decision-makers, everything.

Any sensible Government would cut spending on London in order to redress the balance a little between the capital and the country.

So imagine the outrage – and outrage is certainly the right word – when Geoffrey Clifton-Brown announced to an audience of Brummies that he would certainly abolish Advantage West Midlands and all the other provincial RDAs – but retain London’s.

He told a conference at Aston University: "By and large the RDAs are going to be abolished. They have a number of roles we are examining in detail to see how they can be delivered.

"We need some small teams on the ground in key cities but only small teams."

Challenged on why London would keep its RDA, Mr Clifton-Brown said only: "That's the position at the moment."

"Where we can, we will bring all these services to the county council and district council. We believe development agencies are an unnecessary and expensive form of government," said Mr Clifton-Brown.

I was so gobsmacked that at first I wondered if I had heard him properly. They’ll keep London’s RDA and axe the rest.

The explanation seems to be that London’s structure – with Boris Johnson as its elected Mayor – means its RDA can’t just be done away with like everyone else’s.
For a start, Boris wouldn’t wear it, apparently.

But if – and I admit it’s a big if but even so – if London needs an RDA then it is unarguable that the provinces need them too.

It’s hard enough for those of us North of Watford to compete with London as it is. Pouring even more money into the capital while draining it away from the regions is inexcusable.

Advantage West Midlands has never been particularly popular and it’s often fairly incapable – especially in the hideous saga of its handling of the Business Link franchise for the region.

Even so, it does some good service to the region and if it were axed, some of its work would still need to be done.

The news that the “localism” of Cameron’s Conservatives doesn’t actually extend beyond the boundaries the area where MPs can’t claim second-home allowances, has not gone down well in the West Midlands.

One top banana in the West Midlands told me immediately after the Clifton-Brown debacle: "This conference is all about how the West Midlands economy is harder hit by the recession than anywhere else in the country.

"This man comes down from London with no thought for his audience in the West Midlands and announces that the capital city - with all its wealth - will be the only place in the country to retain a development agency.

"This is a terrible own-goal by the Conservatives. They really do need to think again about this."

Another said: "He has just destroyed the Conservatives' credibility. Of all the places to keep a development agency, why London? That's the last place which needs it."

It is difficult to understand why Mr Clifton-Brown, who is MP for the Cotswolds which are not a million miles away from Brum, was quite so cavalier with his remarks.

Surely he must have realised that telling Brummies they would once again be treated as London’s poor relations was not a way to win friends and influence people?

It’s true that a row about the fate of a few quangos will not affect many votes let alone the result of the General Election.

Even so, the Conservatives would be wise to think again. If this is the shape of things to come, Mr Cameron’s “localism” will be laughed out of court.

And he will perpetuate sense that there are still “two nations” – the haves of London and the have-nots from everywhere else.

Even natural Conservatives – which most business people remain – were astounded by Mr Clifton-Brown’s news.

It is difficult to imagine this wheeze will be any better received in the other English regions.

Already at a disadvantage compared with the wastefully expensive Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, Mr Cameron will simply fuel resentment, suspicion and demands for real devolution to the regions.

The substitute – giving power to local councils or groups of them – won’t work. Certainly not in the West Midlands probably not anywhere else either.

One out, all out. London’s RDA has to be the first to go. Set a good example to the rest of us.

And if Boris demands its retention because, for some reason, he thinks it’s vital to the future prosperity of his empire then how can anyone argue against RDAs for the rest of the country?

Scrappage works - and proves the case for low taxes

2009-10-26T03:07:00.000-07:00

If you ever needed proof that lower taxes are good for the economy and still bring in lots of loot for the Treasury, look at the car scrappage scheme.

Of all the Government’s ruses to dig us out of the hole Gordon Brown and the banks dug for us, the decision to knock £2,000 off the price of a new car when you trade in an old banger was probably the best.

Car sales in September, a boom month because it’s when the registration plate changes, were up 11 per cent on last year, which is pretty impressive during the depths of a recession.

In September 2008, car dealers managed to shift 331,467 new vehicles. This year, the figure is 357,929.

Of these, 77,316 were sold under the scrappage scheme where the Government knocks a grand off the tax and the dealer cuts the price by the same amount as long as the buyer trades in a car over 10 years old and it’s immediately crushed.

My niece, who was driving around in an L-reg VW Polo she bought from a cousin for £350, was faced with a huge bill to get it through its MoT test.

It made much more sense to trade it for a brand new, very smart and really quite sophisticated, bottom-of-the-range Fiat 500.

Thanks to the upsurge in demand for little cars, it took three months to arrive but when she drove it away from the showroom on Monday, she thought it was worth the wait.

Without the scrappage scheme, there would have been no chance of her buying a new car. And that’s obviously true for thousands of other people as well.

Critics complain it’s really only helping foreign car-makers. But, despite my niece’s purchase, car production in this country hit a 56-month high in August.

Believe it or not, we do still have a successful car-manufacturing industry which employs 280,000 people.

Indeed, the automotive sector as a whole – including sales and servicing – employs no fewer than 780,000 people. That’s a lot of jobs.

As a result of the scrappage scheme, Nissan in Sunderland took on 350 employees, having made 1,200 redundant in the depths of the recession.

Mini's Oxford plant is working a seven-day week; Toyota in Burnaston, Derbyshire, returned to full-time production for two months; Honda in Swindon re-opened; Ford’s engine plants at Dagenham and Bridgend have been working overtime.

It’s not exactly boom time for the British car industry but it’s miles better than it was nine months ago.

The Government set aside £300 million to pay for the scrappage scheme and later bunged in another £100 million to meet the growing demand.

But these figures are not what they seem. In the long run, it is almost certain that the Treasury will actually make money from the scrappage scheme rather than lose it.

I’ve done the sums. It’s complicated but I reckon that in September 2008, the Treasury took a total of £1,046 million in tax from the sale of new cars.

This September, with lower VAT and the scrappage scheme accounting for 21 per cent of sales, the total tax take comes to £1,002 million.

In theory, the Government lost £77 million by knocking a grand off the tax on each car bought under the scrappage scheme.

In reality, it cost the Treasury just £44 million – the cut price helped increase sales dramatically.

It’s fair to assume most cars sold under the scrappage scheme wouldn’t have been sold at all without the price cut.

Even so, that still leaves the Treasury out of pocket to the tune of £44 million in one month.

But then you’ve got to look at what would have happened to the motor industry if the scheme didn’t exist. Car sales could be down dramatically, instead of up.

And declining sales mean fewer jobs. Each person on average income who stops paying tax because they are out of work and starts receiving benefits instead costs the Treasury £14,000 a year.

The lost tax income and the increased benefit costs soon add up – it’s one of the main reasons why the nation’s finances are in such a terrible state.

If the scrappage scheme kept five per cent of all automotive industry workers in their jobs for the month of September, they would have benefited the Treasury to the tune of £45.5 million.

And that would mean the Treasury was making a profit of £1.5 million for the month.

I grant you these back-of-an-envelope sums may not be perfect (see below). But they do show that lower taxes work.

They have clearly stimulated car sales at a time when it was desperately needed. As a result, they have kept people in jobs who might otherwise have been thrown onto the ever-lengthening dole queues.

And – miracle of miracles – the Government has not actually lost out financially either.

Now all we need is a politician willing to accept that less means more and we could look forward to a thriving low-tax economy which supports growth in public spending.

Unfortunately, they’re all too busy arguing about their expenses to notice.

In maths exams, you always had to "show your workings", so here goes:

Can the Government break even on the scrappage scheme? This is how I worked out the sums. They make a lot of assumptions and may be incorrect – but I reckon they go a long way towards showing that the scheme not only pays for itself but that lower taxes not only boost the economy but do no harm to the Exchequer.

In September 2008, car sales totalled 330,295. (http://www.am-online.com/NewCarSalesFigures/)

In September 2009, car sales totalled 367,929 of which 21 per cent, 77,313, were sold under the scrappage scheme. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8292157.stm)

To calculate the tax, I have assumed that the average price paid for a new car is £14,000. This is based on a figure published in the Guardian last year (ie before the scrappage scheme came into effect and therefore before, in theory, the average price fell) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/jun/16/motoring.consumeraffairs)

Given that VAT in 2008 was at 17.5 per cent and it is now at 15 per cent, I have assumed all calculations at the prevailing rate. In both years, the tax is the cost of the car, plus 10 per cent, plus VAT.

If the total purchase price is £14,000, the tax payable is: £3,169 (with VAT at 17.5 per cent). (The basic price being £10,831 plus 10 per cent (£1,083) = £11,914.10. Add in VAT and it comes to £14,000.

Thus in September 2008, the tax take from new car sales was £3,169 per car x 330,295 = £1,046,704,855.

In September 2009, the tax take on a £14,000 car would be £2,933. Thus the potential tax take would have been £2,933 x 367,929 = £1,079,135,757.

However, the estimated tax take is reduced by £77,313,000 (ie £1,000 per car purchased under the scrappage scheme). This brings the tax take down to £1,001,822,757.

As a result, the apparent shortfall between the tax take in 2008 and 2009 is £44,882,098.

It follows that the apparent cost to the Treasury of £77 million has actually been cut to £44 million.

However, the boost to the economy provided by the additional sales has an immediate impact on jobs. Of course it is difficult to calculate with any accuracy the true extent of that impact.

For instance, we cannot say that all 77,000 new cars sold under the scrappage scheme would not have been sold if the scheme did not exist. However, given the poor state of the new car market in recent months, it is reasonable to assume that most of these vehicles would have stayed in the showrooms without the scrappage scheme.

In fairness, fleet sales have been stimulated by the threat of VAT reverting to 17.5 per cent (or even going up to 20 per cent) but even so, we have to make some assumptions about the impact on the motor industry if the scrappage scheme were not in place.

According to the SMMT (see below) there are still 780,000 people employed in the motor industry. It is reasonable to argue that some of these people would have been laid off if the lower tax regime for some new cars had not been in place.

According to a National Employment Panel report (see below), the cost of someone switching from employment on average pay to unemployment and benefits is £14,355 to the Treasury in lost income from direct and indirect taxes plus additional expenditure in benefits. This works out at £1,166 per person per month.

Thus to account for the £44 million tax shortfall, the scrappage scheme would need to have secured work for 37,700 people for the month of September.

That sounds like quite a lot but it is actually only 4.8 per cent of the motor industry workforce.

Notes:

Employees in manufacturing:
http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/statistics/manufacturing/Employees

Employees in sales and parts
http://www.autoindustry.co.uk/statistics/Retail/Number%20of%20Employees

The cost to the Treasury is based on the statistics to be found in a case study report prepared for the National Employment Panel (www.northeastiep.gov.uk/.../CEI%20-%20Amion%20Case%20study%20report.pdf) which includes a table analysing the costs and benefits of employment compared with unemployment. This shows:

Earnings £22,170 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings average gross earnings
Taxable pay £17,275 Above less personal allowance
Monthly £1,847 Gross earnings per month
Taxable £1,439 Taxable earnings per month
Tax £308 Tax tables PAYE per month
NI total £343 Employer and employee's NI contributions per month
Annual tax, NI £7,814 Total tax, NI, per year based on gross earnings
Net pay £14,355 Net pay before tax credits
Tax credits (2 kids, non-working wife) £2,839
Total tax, NI less tax credit £4,975 Tax take less tax credits
Indirect taxes £2,656 VAT, excise etc (assumption)
Total Tax, NI , VAT, less tax credit £7,631

Benefits £6,388 DWP accounts - benefit and admin spending per
working age claimant (ignoring spending on children)

Total exchequer benefit per annum £14,019

Thorough and fair?

2009-10-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

Quite rightly, the controversy over all-women shortlists for the selection of Conservative parliamentary candidates will not go away.

As a contribution to the debate, I thought it worth drawing attention to the Conservative Party's guide for potential candidates:

"Local constituency associations have the final say in who they choose as their candidate. They will interview applicants, and through their own selection process, decide upon their chosen man or women. The process is thorough and fair, and allows every applicant to present themselves to the best of their ability. Associations want to find out about the real you. You will be required to make a short speech and answer questions. The most important thing is to be honest and to explain what skills you have that would make a good MP."

Make bankers invest in the real world

2009-10-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

Here’s an answer to the bank bonus business – please tell me why it wouldn’t work.

We discovered a year ago that we need profitable banks. Yet the massive bonuses now being paid to some of their staff are beyond objectionable.

They are a slap in the face for every SME that’s struggling to survive in the teeth of a bank-led crackdown on the availability of working capital.

So here’s a solution.

Make the recipients of the bonuses invest their money for five years in British SMEs.

We can’t allow the fat cats to walk away with their ill-gotten gains, especially those who are employed by bailed-out banks now more or less completely owned by the taxpayer.

Yet it would probably be wrong to deny them their money, given that they are responsible for boosting these banks’ profits.

The problem exercising politicians and regulators is how to curb this excess.

Lord Myners, the Treasury minister, has summoned Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Morgan Stanley to a meeting to discuss a clampdown. Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds and Standard Chartered have already been hauled over the coals.

But most solutions seem unworkable in practice.

A windfall tax on the banks themselves is tempting but it would do more harm than good as it would deny shareholders a dividend and/or delay the restoration of the banks’ balance sheets.

Let the bankers have their money but, above a nominal sum of, say £5,000, force anyone in receipt of a bonus to invest it in a national turnaround fund for SMEs.

If the fund succeeds, and the businesses survive, then the bankers would get their money back in five years’ time.

If it does especially well, they could see their capital increase and that would be their reward for supporting the SMEs which have been abandoned by their employers, the banks.

If it fails, they lose their money then they are no worse off than they would have been if the bonuses were somehow banned altogether.

Better still, these bankers would immediately have a personal financial interest in the health of the national economy and the SMEs which feed it.

Indeed, given that they are supposedly so clever their talent would allow them to move elsewhere if they were denied big bonuses, they would be free to offer their talents to the SMEs they invested in.

They would become, by default, active business angels. And that, in itself, would help to sort the talented from the chancers.

This need not be an expensive scheme. All over the country, regional development agencies have established modest turnaround funds to help SMEs survive when the banks have refused them any more money.

The one I know best is the Advantage Transition Bridge Fund in the West Midlands. It has received £9 million of taxpayers’ money and invested the lot. It has run out of cash.

The people in charge say they will eventually get the money back and, in the meantime, they have saved several thousand jobs.

Because the fund is out of cash, it cannot now help any more companies. But there is no doubt more help is needed.

One reason is that the tax “holiday” generously provided by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has now come to an end.

HMRC now wants to collect what is owing. Unfortunately, some companies do not have the ready money. They have depended on the tax holiday to survive.

As a result, as one chartered accountant put it to me the other day, “HMRC has now become one of the country’s biggest sub-prime lenders”.

Now it’s payback time and a good many of the companies in debt to HMRC can’t pay. Without some other source of cash, they will go bust.

The banks won’t give them money so a new wave of company failures is likely.

However, if the bankers’ bonuses were invested in these businesses via a properly administered turnaround fund, they would be thrown a lifeline and given a chance of survival.

In the long run, this would benefit all of us – even the big-bonused bankers.

All we need is a simple piece of legislation.

Require employers paying bonuses over a certain sum (not just banks but any business offering what most people would see as excessive bonuses) to invest the money directly in turnaround funds, in the names of the appropriate employees.

Require the funds to support SMEs.

Permit the individuals to recover their money from the funds in five years’ time.

If the funds are in surplus, then divide the profits proportionately; if they are not, then divide the losses in the same way.

Of course, employers would want to get around the scheme, perhaps by offering staff massive salary increases instead of bonuses.

It would not be difficult to prevent that from happening by simply limiting pay rises among highly-incentivised employees to inflation plus a percent or two.

I can’t see anything wrong with this solution. It is workable and it is fair. It does not deny people their money but it requires them to put it to good use for the benefit of the real economy.

It even provides a link between the fantasy world of the fat-cat banker and the real world of the struggling business. It’s about time the two worlds collided.

The unholy Trinity

2009-10-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

Once The Birmingham Post and the Evening Mail fell into the clutches of Trinity Mirror, they were doomed.

A series of appalling mistakes and misjudgements ensured the Post’s demise was hastened every step of the way.

The same happened at what I still call the Evening Mail, only there, the impact was even more hideous.

It was, after all, the Mail that kept the company profitable.

In recent years, the Post’s role was simply to survive so City investors were willing to stump up money. They liked the company because, to those who never saw it, the Post retained its reputation as a prestigious paper.

Trinity Mirror’s blight has now rotted away both papers and it is difficult to see where they can go from here.

The Post may survive as a weekly. If the owners actually wanted to do so, they could turn it into a very successful paper. I somehow doubt that they will, though.

As for the Mail, it will go to bed the night before it goes on sale and readers will be lucky if it even manages to include last night’s football results. It will be utterly changed, presumably in a bid to cut distribution costs and catch readers earlier in the day.

This looks doomed to fail.

The sad demise of the Post & Mail is not due to the slump in advertising revenue, changed demographics or competition from the internet. Or at least, not entirely.

These and other factors are hitting all newspaper publishers. They do represent a long-term challenge to the industry.

But why has the Post & Mail’s decline been so precipitate? Not because its journalists lack dedication or talent. Not because the city of Birmingham lacks an interest in local news. Not because of the competition from new media.

It’s been so sharp because Trinity Mirror never had a strategy for the company. It never had anyone with any interest in the city. Indeed, it seems never to have had anyone in charge with any affinity for the business of creating newspapers and communicating with readers.

In short, it is the result of ten years of rank bad management. The company deserves this dreadful day – the staff and the readers do not.

The company’s managing director John Griffith apparently broke the news to the huddled hacks by claiming it was only “the latest development in the proud history of the Post & Mail”.

When he invited questions, he was met with silence. That’s no surprise. As the representative of the absentee landlords, it is quite clear Trinity Mirror have got no answers.

A fine time to impose fines on British industry

2009-10-13T03:30:00.000-07:00

How is it possible the Government should even contemplate fining our biggest manufacturing company £1 billion in the depths of recession?

The Serious Fraud Office wants the defence company to be prosecuted and fined for obtaining contracts through the bribery of foreign officials.

And the sum of money BAe Systems stands to lose would be up to £1 billion - a sum so vast it could threaten the very future of the company.

These alleged offences took place in the 1990s. They involved a bit of old-fashioned graft which saw BAe salesmen grease a few palms in order to win contracts for the company.

They bribed people in South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Tanzania and Romania with vast sums of money - allegedly - in pursuit of lucrative defence contracts.

But so what if they did? If BAe hadn't distributed a few bungs, their rivals certainly would have done so the work would have gone elsewhere - to France, Germany, Italy or the USA.

If bribery is a part of doing business in other parts of the world, why force British companies to compete with their hands tied because our Government takes a prissy attitude to the way some people have to oil the wheels of commerce?

The Serious Fraud Office is demanding that action against BAe Systems is authorised by the Attorney General, none other than Baroness Scotland.

This woman should not even be in her job any more. She has just been fined £5,000 for employing an illegal immigrant as her cleaning lady.

Baroness Scotland is in no position to pronounce on the honesty and integrity of anybody. It would be scandalous if she now used her position to threaten one of this country's most important companies.

For let's be clear about this. BAe Systems is a great British business and a major employer.

We are in the dark days of a dreadful recession. We need all the jobs and prosperity we can get.

You may not like the arms trade but it happens that we are pretty good at it and can compete for contracts around the world. In the past this did involve some corrupt practices which, in an ideal world, companies should avoid.

But what would you rather see - a successful British business which may sometimes stoop to bribery to fend off its rivals, or a failed company which has a jolly ethical trading policy but no work, no contracts and no jobs?

BAe is under new management these days. It's cleaned up its act. It doesn't stoop to bribery any more.

So why should Baroness Scotland, of all people, be allowed to launch an attack on the company?

What good would it do apart from destroy jobs and trash the reputation of a great company?

And all for the satisfaction of allowing this failing, discredited Government to occupy the moral high ground while surrounded by the corpses of British manufacturing industry.

Baroness Scotland's final act before resigning should be to tell the SFO there is no way it can hound BAe any longer. It's a luxury this country simply can't afford.

Big Brother turns a blind eye

2009-10-13T03:28:00.000-07:00

Our Glorious Leader claims “action squads” of police will patrol neighbourhoods to deal with troublemakers before they drive anyone else to suicide.

In his latest attempt to re-launch his Premiership, Gordon Brown promises: “Wherever and whenever there’s anti-social behaviour, we will the there to fight it.”

How come this is a promise of future action when Labour’s been in power for 12 years and got elected on the pledge to be “tough on crime”?

It took the deaths of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francesca, following years of torment at the hands of their scumbag neighbours in Leicestershire, to make Mr Brown acknowledge there was even a problem.

Yet anti-social behaviour is everywhere. Gangs of louts with nothing better to do than cause trouble roam free about our estates and town centres, picking fights with anyone they don’t like or who gets in their way.

Councils can’t be bothered to do anything; the police are worse. Their parents are often as bad as the kids, so there’s no chance of getting any sense out of them.

What has our Government done to tackle the plague of low-level nastiness which terrorises neighbourhoods throughout the country?

They have targeted the law-abiding. They have criminalised the innocent. They have turned common sense on its head.

Take the case of nine-year-old Steven Hennessey, hauled over the coals for the heinous crime of racism.

Excited by lessons about the Second World War, he made an imaginary gun with his fingers and told a classmate: “We've got to shoot the German army.”

The poor lad was disciplined by the school for this “crime” which must have been committed by most boys his age since 1914 at least.

Then there’s dinner lady Carol Hill, sacked from an Essex primary school, for telling parents Clair and Scott David, she’d rescued seven-year-old Chloe after she was tied up and hit by other pupils.

The school had been “economical with the truth” about what happened. Mrs Hill told the truth.

And, just to prove that bullying is rife at the school, Mrs Hill was dismissed for her trouble.

Even police officers are not protected from the madness of Brown’s Britain. The schools watchdog Ofsted has apparently nothing better to do than clamp down on rogue babysitters.

Job-sharing detective constables Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett are banned from looking after each-other’s toddlers because they aren’t registered child-minders.

Teachers won’t put sticking plasters on children’s playground injuries; parents are banned from taking pictures at school plays; games of conkers are prohibited.
Officialdom enjoys throwing its weight about, subjugating its victims and cowing even the most innocent into submission.

We have a vast, humourless bureaucracy which wants to impose its will over every aspect of the lives of ordinary people.

A word out of place can destroy your career prospects. And there is no private life any more – every aspect of our behaviour is subject to official sanction.

It could be a question of sensible child-care arrangements between consenting adults with nothing known against them at the Criminal Records Bureau or it could be local councils spying on what rubbish you’re throwing away.

Big Brother Is Watching You. But only if you are not likely to cause him too much trouble.

If you are in a gang of louts who go round the streets smashing things up and intimidating the neighbours, then, of course, Big Brother would rather turn a blind eye.

It would appear as if Fiona Pilkington was literally driven mad by the constant campaign of harassment and intimidation waged against her.

She, her mother and neighbours made 33 calls to the police over a catalogue of incidents. They appealed to the local council.

But one of the ringleaders of the campaign taunted her: “We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.”

It’s not impossible to imagine our “caring services” dismissing Miss Pilkington as a bit of a nutter.

You can hear the conversation between the “professionals” we employ to protect us when Miss Pilkington called up: “Oh, it’s her again. Don’t bother. She’s always moaning about something.”

Almost certainly Miss Pilkington was regarded as the trouble-maker, not the brats who threw stones, set fire to gates, cut phone lines, jumped on the hedge and spattered the house with eggs and flour.

This sort of crime is not rare. It blights our lives but it’s not headline-grabbing so it probably doesn’t offer the police much of an incentive to get stuck in.

Big Brother prefers easy pickings, plaguing the lives of the decent, honest, law-abiding majority. So nasty, low-level trouble is left to fester it gets out of hand.

As it did when drunken thugs Jason Talbot and Arthur Henry beat Peter White to death in Bilston before stealing £20 from his pockets and spending it on a game of pool, a bag of chips and more booze.

That’s the time the police usually sit up and take notice. Still, at least there’s an “action squad” at work now where Fiona Pilkington used to live – busy guarding the family which made her life hell.

History is history

2009-10-13T03:20:00.000-07:00

The queues of people waiting patiently outside Birmingham Art Gallery to see the Staffordshire hoard are proof enough – our history fascinates us.

So why is the subject taught so half-heartedly in our schools that a newly-qualified teacher assured me the other day the Middle Ages came before the Romans? When I turned up at Birmingham Art Gallery to see the Staffordshire hoard, I was told I’d have to wait at least two hours to get in.

Sadly, I didn’t have the time so I have yet to see the gold and silver Anglo-Saxon artefacts dating back to the Dark Ages (after the Romans and before the Middle Ages) around the year 700.

A friend says the show itself is disappointing ¬- only about 100 of the 1,300 items are on show, the displays are uninspiring, the explanations brief and the crowds thick.

That hasn’t stopped thousands of people hanging around outside the gallery for hours on end to get a glimpse of these treasures before they’re shipped off London.

Having lain undisturbed in a field between Burntwood and Brownhills for centuries, there’s now an argument over whether the hoard should find a permanent home in Staffordshire. Let’s hope it does.

It is obviously a remarkable find so the huge interest is understandable. And it shows how important our history is to us.

Our love of our past is ever-present. That’s why we watch rubbishy TV series like “The Tudors” and why Hilary Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall” about Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell won the Booker Prize.

So why has history become an optional extra in our schools? And, worse still, why is it so haphazardly taught when it’s taught at all?

A bright, intelligent, well-educated young man was telling me the other day about how he had set his primary school class to work looking at the kind of food people ate in the Middle Ages.

I said that was all well and good but would the kids get an idea of the context of this little snippet of history? Don’t they need to understand the time-lines and the way our country has changed and developed over the centuries?

He said I had a point but everybody knew the basics – such as the “fact” that after the Middle Ages came the Roman occupation of Britain.

I need not tell Express & Star readers what hideous nonsense that is. And admittedly the chap’s girl-friend had the decency to squirm with embarrassment.

Levels of ignorance about the basic facts of our history are astonishing. An undergraduate recently confessed she thought Sinn Fein was a person and she’d never heard of the IRA.

To test the extent of this ignorance, I quizzed three graduates in their 20s.

They could not say what happened in 1215 (Magna Carta), they did not know who was king before Henry VII (Richard III) or even the century in which Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector.

They couldn’t say when Nelson won Trafalgar (1805) or Wellington won Waterloo (1815) nor could they say which of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Michael Howard had never been Prime Minister.

We can’t blame the kids. The Historical Association says most children receive little or no history education after the age of 13 and, for many 11 and 12-year-olds, it’s only an hour a week.

This is part of the cruelty of the modern education system – cruel because it deprives eager-to-learn young people of the opportunities and benefits of learning for the sake of it.

There are few practical ways we can exploit an interest in history.

It won’t get us jobs or promotion at work. Nobody will pay us extra because we know when the Spanish launched their Armada. An understanding of the Industrial Revolution won’t boost British manufacturing industry.

Yet a knowledge of history enriches our lives, gives us a greater understanding of human nature and helps to explain why the world today is the way it is.

Why, after all, is Britain the most Eurosceptic nation in the EU if it isn’t because we are the only member country which can celebrate almost 1,000 years of home rule?

The past is always being distorted to suit the needs of the present. That’s why Tony Blair apologised for the slave trade – even though ours was the first country to abolish it and we led the way in its eradication.

Political correctness forces us to apologise for our “evil empire”.

But as Michael Palin, the ex-Monty Python comedian and traveller, says: "If we say that all of our past involvement with the world was bad and wicked and wrong, I think we're doing ourselves a great disservice.”

Actually, most of us are proud of our past. Politicians should note that the National Trust has more than 3,500,000 members – the Conservative, Labour and Lib-Dem parties combined can boast about 550,000.

It’s not just the National Trust that will lose out if we give up teaching history in schools.

A country which forgets its past has no future. You could say that without history, we’re history.

I am not a citizen of Europe, I am a free man

2009-10-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've just signed a petition on Facebook urging Czech President Vaclav Klaus to reject the Lisbon Treaty which is th EU Constitution by another name.

He is just about our last hope of preventing the creation of a "legal entity" which will be a European superstate.Go to the Facebook page and sign up. It probably won't do any good but you never know.

#http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=144395234460

Scandals of the day

2009-10-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

Paedophiles share their perversions over the internet. So why not make the internet service providers liable for giving people access to illegal web-sites? If they can take responsibility for illegally downloading music, surely they should be liable for permitting their customers to view disgusting child porn?

Out-of-hours doctors are not up to the job. So why not invite our own GPs to spend a little more time looking after their patients in return for the excessive pay rises they were awarded by the Government? When a doctor’s on £150,000 a year (and a lot of them are), it’s reasonable to expect them to stir themselves once in a while in order to keep their patients alive, isn’t it?

The Irish are forced to get it right this time and vote Yes in their second referendum on the Lisbon convention which creates a United States of Europe. So it’s perhaps no wonder politicians in this country are thinking about making referendums (referenda?) a regular feature of British “democracy” – it’s a policy for despotism and dictatorship. Say No as often as you like but when you give into the demands of the political elite and say Yes, the question never comes back again. Referendums are a one-way trip to totalitarianism.

Baroness Scotland gets to decide what to do about British Aerospace’s multi-million pound bribe scandal. So how can we possibly tolerate someone who has just been fined £5,000 for employing an illegal immigrant as the final arbiter of right and wrong? Get rid of the Baroness and throw out the Serious Fraud Office’s point-scoring prosecution before this goes any further and manufacturing jobs are destroyed as a result. Or is this country so blessed with successful industry that we don’t care what happens to our largest manufacturer?

Global warming takes the planet by storm

2009-09-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

We’ve had wildfires in California and droughts in Australia. We’ve had hippies, crusties and trustafarians camped out in London or super-gluing themselves to city banks.

Ban Ki-moon, head of the United Nations, watched polar ice caps melt.

The European Union wants to ban coal-fired power stations because they belch CO2 into the atmosphere, so we may soon face Third World-style power cuts.

Our Government’s slapped yet another 2p “green tax” on petrol and the EU has banned the sale of common-or-garden 100 watt light-bulbs.

We must all do our bit to save the planet from the filth, waste and pollution mankind has created since the Industrial Revolution started here in the Black Country.

But if global warming threatens to fry the planet, how come we’ve just come to the end of the third dull, wet, washout summer in a row?

We all know the “barbecue summer” promised by the Met Office was a figment of some spin doctor’s imagination designed to take our minds off the recession.

But the long-range forecasters and doom-mongers keep telling us Britain is heating up to the point where we won’t be able to grow anything but cacti in the garden and the best wine growing region in Europe will be the Severn Valley.

Why is the evidence before our eyes so at odds with the claims and warnings of the scientific establishment?

They say summers are hot and arid, we see they’re cold and wet.

Back in the 1970s, the scientific establishment was warning the world that we faced another Ice Age.

The Thames would freeze over, the country would be covered in layers of ice and snow.

We would be driven to the brink of extinction by bitter cold bringing food shortages, famine and pestilence in its wake.

Whatever happened to the New Ice Age?

Strangely, the weather doesn’t always do what the doomsters predict? For instance, believe it or not, the planet hasn’t actually got any hotter in the past ten years.

So they move the goalposts. The threat previously known as “global warming” now tends to be described as “climate change”.

That way, we can be scared to death by the political, scientific and media consensus whether or not the planet is actually warming up.

“Climate change” means every time the weather takes a turn for the worse, mankind and our CO2 emissions can be blamed.

Floods and fires, hurricanes and droughts – we’re told they are all “severe weather events” caused by the changing climate.

We are constantly told we have to pay more for our petrol, buy more expensive light-bulbs and stop using plastic carrier bags or we will all die a horrible death.

And – worse – we will condemn people in the Third World to mass starvation.

This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the world’s population has risen from 2.5 billion in 1950 to almost seven billion today and will hit nine billion around 2050.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that we should conserve the earth’s resources, use less energy and try to achieve greater “sustainability”.

But we are constantly told that climate change is an established fact.

We are told it’s the result of mankind’s abuse of this lovely planet of ours and that we’re all dead in the water unless we act now. Urgently. This very minute.

In fact, scientists are not unanimous about either of these claims. They do not all agree the climate is changing, let alone getting warmer; and they do not all accept that mankind is to blame even if changes are taking place.

The issue has become a matter of religious faith rather than scientific debate. Anyone who questions the view that we’re all frying ourselves to death is treated as an unbeliever.

A “climate-change denier” is regarded as almost as despicable as a holocaust denier.

In the Middle Ages, they would be burned at the stake as heretics. Obviously that wouldn’t be a carbon neutral response to such blasphemy these days.

There are plenty of reputable scientists and politicians who remain sceptical about the whole climate-change scaremongering industry. There is plenty to be dubious about.

The EU says petrol must include 2.5 per cent bio-fuels which means higher food prices because land is being given over to fuel when it should be growing food.

As well as being more costly, “green” light-bulbs use banned toxins and have to be kept on much longer to make them efficient – which means they don’t cut down fuel consumption as advertised.

Despite ex-US Vice President Al Gore’s claims, polar bears are not dying out and the ice caps were thinner in the 1950s than they are today.

We’re told Australia is enduring its worst drought since records began. But actually the droughts from 1895 to 1903 and from 1939 to 1945 were just as bad.

Global warming may be taking place and CO2 emissions may, possibly, have some responsibility for it.

But that doesn’t mean we’re heading for catastrophe. And a long, hot summer would be quite nice once in a while.

Don't be a Smartie be a good egg

2009-09-16T15:19:00.001-07:00

Did you know Smarties are made in Spain and Germany and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges come from factories in Sweden, Belgium, Poland and Slovakia?

Smarties used to be made by that historic Quaker company Joseph Rowntree in York – until it was taken over by Nestle and 646 jobs went abroad.

The chocolate oranges were made by another historic business in York, Joseph Terry, until it was taken over by US giant Kraft Foods, the factory was shut down and 316 jobs were exported.

So don’t let anyone con us into believing that if Kraft Foods wins its £10.2 bllion-plus bid to take over Cadbury’s there is a Crunchie’s chance in Hell that Dairy Milk and Crème Eggs will continue to be made in Britain.

Cadbury’s have rejected Kraft’s bid. But the company will come back with a better offer. And there’s every chance America’s Kit-Kat maker Hershey, will join the fray.

In time, the world-famous Cadbury name could disappear. The factory in Bournville, if not its sports fields and model village, would be destroyed and the 2,500 people who work there would be looking for other work. Not that there’s much of it about.

And it’s no use complaining. Our politicians repeatedly tell us we’re in a “global market” where the nationality of a company’s owners is irrelevant.

They will point out that most of Cadbury’s shareholders, as well as its chief executive, Todd Stitzer, are American.

They will say you can’t interfere in market forces and Kraft Foods will, in any case, issue all sorts of nonsense about the “integrity of the brand” and similar nonsense in a bid to persuade us they won’t do anything nasty.

An appeal to patriotism won’t work. The Government would not step in and declare Cadbury’s is so vital to the national interest it can’t be sold to a foreign buyer at any price.

They do just that in France. When yoghurt-maker Danone looked like being swallowed up by an American company, the French Government declared it to be “strategic industry” to protect it from foreign take-over.

The ownership of Cadbury’s does matter. As this recession throws away hundreds of perfectly decent British companies, what are we to do as a nation if all our manufacturing goes abroad?

Cadbury’s is vital to the national interest. If it remains British-based, decisions about its future will be made here and its future in Birmingham would be reasonably secure.

True, even British owners are not above shutting up shop and exporting manufacturing to countries with cheaper labour. But there’s more chance of survival if the company’s owned and managed here.

If the Government won’t step in to protect Cadbury’s, what about the shareholders? This is the company’s best bet to avoid being swallowed whole.

Despite all the hullabaloo and excitement over multi-billion-dollar deals, most of them do not work.

Highly-paid and ambitious chief executives never accept it but a merger of Kraft Foods and Cadbury’s will almost certainly be bad news for shareholders in the long run.

Cadbury’s themselves know the truth of this – that’s why the company ceased to be Cadbury-Schweppes and the drinks division floated off on its own.

Sweet deals often turn sour.

In 1998, German car-maker Daimler-Benz merged with its American counterpart Chrysler in a £30 billion deal. Within five years, everyone knew it was a disaster. Daimler Benz shareholders ended up losing about £10 billion.

In 2000, AOL and Time-Warner merged to create a company allegedly worth £220 billion. But it’s been such a disaster the company’s share price has slumped 70 per cent and Time-Warner is now getting rid of AOL completely.

When deals like this are done, the big cheeses promise “synergies”. Nobody knows what a synergy is but it sounds technical and impressive so shareholders give them the benefit of the doubt.

Then they talk about “leveraging the brand”. Note that the word “leveraging” is pronounced in American – “lever” as in “never” – and therefore it, too, sounds impressive.

And, of course, “brand” means whatever you want it to mean. Basically, a name.

No doubt Kraft – famous for such uninspiring commodities as frankfurters and processed cheese – wants Cadbury’s to give a boring company a bit of kudos.

It thinks it can save billions by merging “the back office” – this is what companies always promise but rarely deliver.

Sadly, shareholders rarely look beyond the immediate cash-in-hand profit.

If they did, they would see that flogging Cadbury’s is almost certainly foolhardy and will cost them money in the long run.

Cadbury’s won’t stay British by appealing to the shareholders’ sentiment, patriotism or sense of history.

But it may stay British if shareholders are reminded, as often as possible, that mega-deals don’t work.

A study by KPMG, the accountancy firm, says only 17 per cent of mega-mergers actually add value for shareholders, while 53 per cent destroy it.

If a deal is done, not only would it threaten one of our greatest manufacturing names, but the value of shares in Kraft-Cadbury would be more flaky than a Cadbury’s Flake.

Which – for shareholders – ought to be the best possible reason to keep Cadbury’s British.

MG Rover dodging the real scandal

2009-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

We all know the Phoenix Four lined their own pockets when they took over MG Rover.

It comes as no surprise to learn they made about £9 million each while their chief executive, Kevin Howe, was got £5.7 million.

Whatever they may have claimed, they were no public-spirited philanthropists. Just businessmen with an eye on the main chance.

They took on Rover, gave it another five years of life, might have kept going a bit longer if talks with the Chinese had worked out, and provided for their retirements.

As today’s report makes clear: it was not illegal, it may be disreputable, it is not a surprise. And – let’s face it – John Towers and the other Musketeers are hardly unique in displaying a bit of greed in the face of temptation.

Just ask our Members of Parliament or Britain’s leading bankers.

It’s four years since MG Rover went bust with debts of £1 billion, nine since the Phoenix Four took over from BMW.

We, the taxpayers, have now lost another £16 million paying for an independent report into the collapse.

There won’t be any prosecutions so all we’re left with is the hardly-revelatory news that the Phoenix Four-plus one made a bob or two from MG Rover.

Well, why would you take on the ailing car company in the first place, if you didn’t hope to make money out of it?

What is incredible is that we have seen no similar inquiry into the collapse of our banking system let alone a serious indictment of the behaviour of the people who ran it – despite the hue and cry over Fred "the Shred" Goodwin at RBS.

I maintain that our bankers should be banned from ever serving as company directors again having broken the laws which require directors to act in the best interests of the shareholders, employees and others with an interest in a company.

Had it not been for the Government, most of our banks would have gone the way of MG Rover. Yet we worry about the non-bail-out of the car-maker while apparently taking the bungs to the banks in our stride.

If you’re looking for business scandal, don’t bother with MG Rover. It’s small fry. Try Britain’s top bankers.

They are the people we should be vilifying, accusing and prosecuting. The Phoenix Four at least had the merit of trying to save a piece of Britain’s dying manufacturing sector.

The bankers never even tried to do that. Now, thanks to their crass stupidity, incompetence and sheer greed, what’s left of our manufacturing base is disappearing because the banks won’t lend them any money.

The MG Rover collapse was a great pity for the West Midlands and the British motor industry. Our banking disaster was – and remains – a scandal for the entire country.

Yet no politician is prepared to take on the guilty men. The Phoenix Four-plus one are third eleven players compared with the first team strutting around the corridors of power in their gleaming banks with their bucket-loads of bonuses.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, says he will now take action to disqualify John Towers and his colleagues from ever again serving as company directors.

What about taking action against our bankers?

We should sue each of them and force them to repay their personal wealth. Whatever actions the Phoenix Four may be guilty of, the directors of many of our banks were up to something far, far worse.