Jobs and profits

Spot the connection:

Here in The Independent:

Lloyds Banking Group delivered another blow to staff today as it unveiled plans to slash a further 15,000 jobs by 2014 in a bid to save £1.5 billion a year.

And here from the BBC, Lloyds shares since 8 am this morning have increased in value from 44.65 pence to 47.95 pence, an increase of 7.38%.

It's an ill wind etc.

We're all in this together (part19)

Not royalty of course. You can't expect Them to behave like we peasants are obliged to do. The Guardian reports:

Prince Charles's income – including funding from the taxpayer for his official duties – rose by nearly £1m last year, according to figures published in the annual review of his activities. His aides insisted that the increases were either not rises at all, or reflected an increase in official visits undertaken at the government's behest.

... Remarkably, although the review indicates the prince travelled 34,000 miles on royal duties in the past year, to the end of this March – 9,000 fewer than the previous year – and halved the amount of foreign travel he undertook, the cost rose by £388,000, to £1,080,000. On a simple cost basis that represents £31.50 a mile, compared with £16.13 the previous year.

Prince Charles's income from grants-in-aid, to subsidise his royal duties, and from government departments, rose by £298,000 to £1.962m. His main income, which comes from the duchy of Cornwall – the ancestral estates of princes of Wales – was up by nearly 4% last year to £17,796,000, owing to profits from his bonds portfolio.

Republican curmudgeons will pontificate about scrounging off state benefits, but enough of such whingeing. Look on the bright side. HRH is doing his best to counteract job losses in the public sector:

The size of the household – 132.8 members of staff compared with 124 the previous year – increased slightly.

Accordingly, let us celebrate this wise and sensible successor to his illustrious ancestors.

The need for 33 Rear Admirals and 170 Brigadiers

So Dr Fox is going to slim down the top military brass. Plenty of scope, according to The Telegraph:

Four Star

Admiral: 2
General: 6
Air Chief Marshal: 3

Three Star

Vice Admiral: 7
Lieutenant General: 9
Air Marshal: 8

Two Star

Rear Admiral: 33
Major General: 43
Air Vice Marshal: 26

One Star

Commodore: 80
Brigadier: 170
Air Commodore: 90

What a lot of military bigwigs!

MPs in glass houses

So what about the pension arrangements of those seeking to diminish the entitlements of honest public servants? The Guardian sets out the position:

MPs have the most generous final salary pension scheme in the country. They get a choice of contribution levels – the more they contribute the more the state puts into their pension. Many people accrue benefits at a rate of 1/80th of their final salary for every year they have belonged to their scheme (or 1/60th at the most) but some MPs can accrue at a rate of up to 1/40th of final salary.

Not so bad. Of course they will be amending it, won’t they? Well, not any time soon:

In this year's budget, chancellor George Osborne accepted the recommendations made in Hutton's report and added: "I believe this House should also recommend similar changes to the pensions of MPs." However, no date has been set for this and there are unlikely to be any changes this year.

Music of the week

Say a prayer for the cowgirl ...

It's another fine mess

From The Observer (here):

Erik Britton, director of City consultancy Fathom, said: "It's not the direct exposure, it's the indirect exposure and the implications of an unruly default that I would be worried about. French and German banks bought Greek bonds, and they took out insurance against default. Who did they take out that insurance with? The US and UK banks. There has to be a loser – who's the loser?"

Somehow, I suspect that it will be the poor bloody taxpayer.

End of an era

So farewell Habitat. To people of my generation, you set new standards in furniture and kitchenware. In the 1970s, when I was setting up my first home, Habitat was the place to go to equip it. It was considered stylish, not too expensive and good value. Above all, it was a refreshing change from the boring, shoddy, over-priced crap that was previously available from department stores.

So some of us will remember Habitat fondly.

In praise of John McEnroe

If it were not for McEnroe and Becker, the BBC's coverage of Wimbledon would be unwatchable. The alternating fawning and patronising by the rest of the vast team assembled by the BBC would put you off tennis for life.

Surely, Miss Wade could be pensioned off. And Sue has probably seen better days. And does Lloyd not have better things to do. Meanwhile, the BBC's jack of all trades, Mr Cottar is as useless at tennis as he is at rugby and golf.

Recipe of the week

Stuffed Peppers
(serves two)

Ingredients

Half a pound of steak mince (or 250g if you insist)
One onion, chopped into as small pieces as possible without cutting your fingers off
One small tin of chopped tomatoes
Black pepper
A generous pinch of basil (dried will be adequate; but if you members of the bourgeoisie wish to deploy leaves from a twig, I can live with that)
A couple of squeezes of garlic puree (or a garlic clove if you are prepared to faff around eviscerating it)
Two large peppers (I prefer red ones for aesthetic reasons but any colour will do)


Brown the mince in a saucepan with a lid. Then add the onion and give it a couple of minutes until it goes vaguely translucent. Then add the pepper, basil, garlic and tomatoes. Simmer on a low heat for half an hour. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Remove and discard any pepper stalks. Cut the peppers in half lengthways. Hoik out the seeds and the white stuff and discard. Ladle the mince sauce into the peppers. Cook (mince side up) on a baking tray in a pre-heated oven at 190 degrees for 45 minutes, then serve. Enjoy.

(Freezes well; after defrosting, reheat in oven for 20 minutes at 170 degrees.)

Quote of the day

In The Telegraph, Clive James ruminates on The Kennedys:

It wasn’t that lousy. It was just terrible, in the sense that terrible was all it was. Watching it wouldn’t necessarily give you any disease more dangerous than a weeping case of pink-eye. There are some who say that a full hour’s exposure to the script in its raw form would be enough to induce full-blown ebola, but by the time the thin banalities of the text had been plumped out with set decoration and acting, what unfolded on screen was merely a cause for despair, not for writhing on the carpet with a melted spine and your brains running out of your ears.

I guess he didn't like it then.

Economics for dummies

It may be written with the US in mind but much of it applies to the UK:

Another day, another bail-out

One of the principal problems with the establishment of the euro was that the system lacked a redistributive mechanism whereby the richer parts of the zone would transfer resources to the poorer parts, thus equalising the economic disparities within the eurozone or, at least , preventing them from becoming worse. It was never entirely true, of course; the structural funds were intended - in a relatively modest way - to do just that. These funds, however, were too modest to make much of a contribution.

Well now the eurozone has found its redistributive mechanism, the bail-out. Ireland and Portugal have already benefited, but the policy has reached its apotheosis in a second bail-out to Greece.

But, I hear you say, this will be the last bail-out; Greece will adopt the proposed austerity package, its finances will recover and the EU will return to its normal self-satisfied routine. Forget it, not a snowball’s chance in hell. Even if the austerity package is adopted and implemented in full (which seems unlikely), there is no possibility that the Greeks can cope with its debts. So next year, the Greeks will be back at the door of Brussels begging for another handout. And, even with the largesse of their own bailouts, the notion that Ireland and Portugal (or Spain and Italy) can develop their economies to match that of Germany is fanciful in the extreme.

So from time to time - annually in the case of Greece, probably less frequently in the case of the others - the northern nations will have to put their hands in their pockets and sling great gobbets of cash towards the PIGS.

The interesting question is how long will it take for the patient taxpayers of Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland to realise that they have been suckered into a massive ongoing subsidy to what some of them might regard as their financially irresponsible counterparts in the South.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this; or maybe it was?

Withdrawal

President Obama’s alleged justification for the pullout of 33,000 troops from Afghanistan is as full of holes as the military’s opposition to it.

The president has been a bit more subtle than Bush’s “mission accomplished” but not much more. The proposition that al-Qaida is “on a path to defeat” seems dubious at best and hopelessly optimistic at worst, while the notion that the Afghan security apparatus is nearly trained and ready to resist insurgency is plainly risible.

On the other hand, the military is still reiterating its mantra of one more push and victory is within our grasp. This is equally daft. Victory is not achievable under any circumstances.

Whatever else happens, Afghanistan will fall apart when the Americans leave. But a continued substantial presence of foreign troops will not resolve the problems and will not bring peace to that corrupt, unhappy country.

So I support the decision to bring back the troops as quickly as possible. If, for political reasons, Obama has to dress up the decision as mission accomplished, then he may be forgiven by history.

Timeo Danaos

Actually, it is not the Greeks we should be fearing. Rather, it is (as ever?) the Germans who are at the heart of the problem.

The current negotiations may well come up with an arrangement which "kicks the can down the road", but given the impossibilities of the Greek position (whose debts outweigh its ability to repay) such an arrangement would merely postpone the evil day.

The least worst solution (call it plan A) would be for the Germans (and their economically strong allies) to leave the euro and set up a new Deutschmark. This would have unwelcome consequences. The new DM would soar against the Mediterranean euro, making German economic domination of Europe more difficult, but making it easier for the Mediterranean countries to compete. (Arguably, this is what needs to happen under any circumstances.) The German banks would be given a severe haircut as the value of their lending to Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc would immediately be reduced as the DM soared (but the Bundesbank could probably afford to bail them out).

If the only realistic alternative to plan A is a continuing bail-out (over a number of years in the future) of our Greek, Portugese, Irish and Italian amici (which is indeed the case), then the German politicians and people might prefer plan A.

Advert of the week

Despite being no great fan of Madness, somehow this ad appeals:

Music of the week

It's not balls

Is a temporary cut in VAT, as advocated by Mr Balls, a bad thing? The Independent thinks not:

... a temporary cut in VAT was exactly the policy pursued during 2009, when the UK was mired in recession. Despite widespread prior scepticism about its effectiveness, the figures show that it did have a very positive effect.

According to analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, an independent think-tank, consumers spent as much as £9bn more than they otherwise would have done during the 13 months for which the VAT cut ran. As a result, retail sales growth accelerated during the downturn rather than collapsing.

All of that extra spending was VAT-able, of course, so the net cost of the reduction was significantly smaller than expected. And that's before one starts to count the wider economic benefits – retail jobs saved, for example – of the spending, which will have produced additional tax revenues.

Not that Slasher Osborne and his little chums will care - they will persist with the masochism strategy. If it's not hurting, it can't be working.

Cynicism rules OK

The coalition's health policy is explained in The Guardian:

Clegg: I love it when we go outdoors together, Daddy. Where are we going?

Cameron: To have our photo taken sitting next to some poor bastard who can't get out of his hospital bed.

Clegg: That's so exciting! What shall I say to him, Daddy?

Cameron: That you love me very much, that I'm a very listening kind of Daddy and that you love my new NHS reforms.

Clegg: I do, I do! But I also loved the old ones that you and Andy tried to rush through last year. That's why I voted for them.

Cameron: I know you did, Cleggster and I appreciate that. But I've done a lot of listening since then and what I've heard is the public don't think I know what I'm doing which is why I'm going to do what the public wants . . .

Clegg: And what's that?

Cameron: Buggered if I know, Cleggster. I've no idea what's in the new bill, but as long as I keep saying we're creating a more streamlined, more bureaucratic, less market-driven, more competitive NHS in which patients have a right to see their GP at any time he or she isn't comparing tenders for healthcare provision, everything should be fine.

Clegg: You're so clever, Daddy.

Lions and tigers

The coalition government has shown admirable flexibility (I'm being kind this morning) over its proposals to tear apart the NHS, as well as those to sell off English forests and to let out early all those prisoners. Meanwhile the social security reforms are crumbling at the edges.

So why is it so stubbornly resisting the imposition of a ban on wild animals in circuses? It is a relatively trivial matter in the grand scheme of things; it isn't even a manifesto commitment (not that that seems to matter anymore). And it's not as though the Tory Party are in the pockets of the circus owners (I think).

It's yet another minor mystery.

We're all in this together ...

... unless of course you're a domestic servant - a cook, a nannie or a cleaner. The Guardian reports:

The government has been accused of betraying Britain's 200-year history in the fight against slavery and of isolating itself on the world stage after refusing to back an international convention protecting domestic workers from exploitation.

On the same day that the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, launched an inquiry by the Centre for Social Justice into tackling the "modern slavery" of trafficking, the coalition revealed it would abstain from voting on the International Labour Organisation's convention covering domestic workers.

The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills said it would not be ratifying the convention to bind the UK by its rules "for the foreseeable future", so felt it would be wrong to vote for it at all.

The UK is thought to be the only member country of the ILO, a UN agency, set to abstain from the vote in Geneva on Thursday.

Shame.