Hillary and me

It's no big deal.  The Guardian reports:

"One of the regrets I have about my public life is that I can't drive any more,"Hillary Clinton told a car dealers' conference on Monday. Among her most painful memories, you suspect this doesn't rank all that high. Yet the remark is a reminder of how wealth and power tend to separate people from normal life, and how they don't always like it. Clinton has not driven a car since 1996, on the instructions of the secret service, and it is something that her husband pines for too. "Whenever I'm on the golf course I always make them let me drive the golf cart," Bill Clinton has said.

I know the feeling.  I sold my last car in 2001 when I took a job in Brussels.  Both there and subsequently back in Edinburgh, I lived close enough to my office to walk to work.  After retirement, I never felt the need for a car, particularly in view of parking restrictions.  Besides, a car seemed like a bottomless pit into which to throw money, given depreciation, insurance and petrol costs.  Accordingly, it did not seem worthwhile to renew my driving licence when it expired.

So, unlike Hillary, I have no regrets,

On yer bike!

Some of us pedestrians would argue that far too many cyclists are already using the pavement.  Not all of us are as mobile as we used to be.  But this transport minister has no obvious qualms about putting us in danger:

Cyclists should be free to go on to a pavement to avoid hazardous stretches of road, Transport Minister Robert Goodwill has told police.

Mr Goodwill said that the police should use their discretion “where a cyclist is using the pavement alongside a dangerous section of road out of fear of the traffic”, The Daily Telegraph reported.

However he also said cyclists must “be mindful to not put pedestrians at risk”.

If cyclists want to use the pavement, let them get off their bikes and wheel them along.

Does he know what he is doing?

The Guardian reports:

George Osborne will today deliver a stark warning to Britain's European partners that the UK will leave the EU unless it embarks on whole-scale economic and political reform.

The chancellor's comments come as the Tory leadership tries to regain the initiative on Europe, after 95 MPs signed a letter calling for the dismantling of the core principles of the EU.

If I were Angie Merkel, I would be sorely tempted to reply "Here's your hat, Georgie boy.  The exit door is over there."

A Parisian fairy tale

Frankie and Val have been shacked up together for three or four years.  But Frankie has been a naughty boy, sneaking off to have a thing with Jools.  Apparently, Val never noticed when, after dinner, Frankie would take his toothbrush and disappear for the night, not re-appearing until after breakfast the next day.  But Val found out last week about Frankie and Jools and went off the deep end.  She was so stressed out (or perhaps she was mentally exhausted, or maybe just a case of the blues) that she had to go into hospital where she remains to this day.

Meanwhile Frankie is saying nuffink.  He does not deny that one of his pals took him to his nights of passion on a scooter, nor that the same pal would bring the couple croissants in the morning.  

Incidentally, Frankie is in the habit of dying his hair, if rather unconvincingly.

Where will it all end?  Probably in tears on the part of both Val and Jools.  On the other hand, they will certainly be better off without serial love-rat Frankie.

Stick or twist?

There is an economic argument going on in the background.

Some pundits cannot wait to plunge us into trouble.  Like this one:

The Bank should be putting up rates now, in a gentle and gradual manner. The money supply is growing at a reasonable rate; nominal GDP is expanding  nicely; employment is soaring; wages of some professions (including brickies and architects) are shooting up; there are already some skill shortages; and the current account deficit is huge, suggesting that aggregate demand is too large compared to supply. Monetary policy should be forward-looking: decisions today have an effect with long and variable lags, so waiting until there is a problem is always too late. Sure, the UK economy remains smaller than at peak; but that will change before the year is up. It is a mistake to look merely at the macro effect of interest rates: the impact on big aggregates such as consumer prices, output or employment. The micro effect also matters hugely – the allocation of credit, capital and labour between different companies and all the myriad decisions that make up an economy are being hugely distorted by artificially low official interest rates. The economy is normalising – monetary policy must follow suit.

On the other hand, some take what appears to me to be a more sensible line:

Chris Giles at the Financial Times has argued that the Bank of England will have to raise rates soon, because recent job growth has been accompanied by low productivity -- a situation that could produce inflation unless the bank acts. The informal Shadow Monetary Policy Committee, which meets at a free-market think tank, has been calling for an interest-rate increase since February last year, when there was no recovery in sight.

What the policy hawks fail to recognize is how damaging a premature tightening could be. As Oxford Professor Simon Wren Lewis has noted, debt-service payments still occupy a large portion of households' budgets. In the absence of an adequate increase in income, even a small increase in interest rates could trigger defaults and foreclosures on a grand scale. Why would anyone intentionally precipitate such a crisis unless coerced by the prospect of rampant inflation?

Why indeed?

SNAFU

There once was a period of time, perhaps a brief period of time, but nevertheless there was indeed a time when a Minister of the Crown took responsibility for the actions of his department whether or not he was personally involved in those actions.  In the Crichel Down affair, Sir Thomas Dugdale resigned when the Ministry of Agriculture made a mess.

It is unlikely to happen nowadays, least of all as a result of the incompetence of the Department of Work and Pensions:

Thousands of people have been wrongly identified as liable for the bedroom tax, including some who now face eviction or have been forced to move to a smaller property, as a result of an error by Department of Work and Pensions.

Housing experts believe as many as 40,000 people could be affected by the mistake. The DWP says it believes only a "small number" of tenants are affected, which it estimates number 5,000.

All could be eligible for refunds worth on average at least £640 per claimant and millions in aggregate.

The error affects working age tenants in social housing who have occupied the same home continuously since 1996. An oversight by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) when drafting the legislation means that the housing benefit regulations dating from 1996 were not updated when the coalition legislated for the bedroom tax.

And so, another scandal sticks to the wall, with nobody accepting responsibility.

How not to do it

The Government's development of the universal credit system will become a case study to be examined in future decades as a classic example of systems development getting deeper and deeper into the mire, while its project sponsors maintain a wilful blindness to the absence of progress.  The Guardian charts the latest inanity:

Despite a scathing NAO report in September, Duncan Smith has been insistent that the project remained on time and on budget. In December he revealed a new plan for delivering the project.

Sources indicate that tensions between government departments spiked after Duncan Smith refused to restart the embattled project afresh – a move that would have incurred massive write-off costs and political embarrassment.

Duncan Smith is understood to have insisted on a "twin track" approach – keeping current universal credit development going to prove that claimants could use the service before the 2015 election – while ordering money and time to be ploughed into a web-based system that did not rely heavily on jobcentre staff to fill in claimant benefit details.

According to the newly approved plans, hundreds of thousands of benefit claimants will then be transferred from one design of universal credit programme to the other once the digital design is ready some time after the general election.

Plan A won't work, Plan B won't work, and transferring data from Plan A to Plan B will be nightmarish.  It would be laughable if it were not so serious.


 

On the one hand ...

The size of the state pension will be maintained:

The prime minister has vowed to guarantee annual increases in the state pension until 2020, and marked them out as the only welfare spending to be exempt from the forthcoming cap if the Conservatives win the next election.

On the other hand, don't expect any cheer on other old age benefits:

David Cameron's pledge aims to reassure older voters that their payouts will continue to rise in line with inflation despite a squeeze on other benefits such as winter fuel payments, TV licences, and free bus passes and prescriptions.

Somehow, I don't believe that pensioners will be terribly pleased ...

In memory of John Fortune

It's far from cheap to feed your habit

Here are the Colorado prices for the newly legalised sale of pot:

Below are some of the options provided by licensed sellers (all prices are subject to an additional 21% sales tax).

• Pre-rolled joints, $10 each. A typical joint contains less than 1 gramme of marijuana.

• 1 oz Indica or Sativa buds: “best”, $179; “better”, $169; “good”, $159.

• Glass pipes: $15-$30.

• Marijuana-infused pomegranate “elixir” drink (75mg): $14.

• Marijuana spearmint dew drops (100mg): $20.

• Marijuana truffles (50mg): $10.

• Marijuana chai mints (100mg): $11.

• Marijuana massage oil (100mg): $14

• Marijuana pain relief lotion (100mg): $18.

• Marijuana bath soak (100mg): $18.

    (And no, you cannot get them by mail order.)

 

Power corrupts

I do not know if the Labour Party is correct when it argues that the energy companies are over-charging consumers.  The miasma engendered by claim and counter-claim makes it difficult to see what is going on,  The Guardian reports:

Households may have paid £150 over the odds for their electricity over the past three years because energy companies bought their power for almost £4bn more than the average market rate, Labour has claimed.

In a new analysis of official figures, the Labour party, which has pledged to freeze prices for 20 months if it wins the general election in 2015, said the big six energy suppliers appear either to be inflating their prices to make extra profits for their own power plants, or striking very expensive deals to the detriment of consumers.

Caroline Flint, the shadow energy secretary, said she could demonstrate that the energy giants – which supply 98% of households in Britain – have been buying electricity at a far higher price than they could get on the open market. This amounts to about £50 a year per household for the last three years for which data is available, she said.

But at least the Labour Party is questioning the practice of the energy companies.  Does anyone believe that the Government would have done anything if Miliband had not raised the matter of a price freeze last autumn?  And would it be unfair to ask what Ofgem, the supposed regulator, has been doing?

Too much Christmas pudding?

Some people might be surprised that Chloe Smith MP thinks she has the answer to political disengagement:

Responding to fears about disengagement by young people from politics, the Tory MP Chloe Smith, a former minister at 31, told the Guardian there was a danger of a political disconnect between young and old, with "generations far apart and not talking to each other". One of her ministerial briefs included improving voter engagement.

"I think there is an existential problem coming for traditional forms of British democracy, which it is in everyone's interests, all of us as democrats, to respond to," she said. "We have to demonstrate what politics is for, why a young person's individual action in voting matters."

But it gives me the opportunity to show again her famous Newsnight interview in which she demonstrates her personal commitment to openness and transparency:

It's not swings and roundabouts

It's going to happen sooner or later.  The Independent reports:

More people believe they would be helped than harmed by a rise in interest rates, according to a new survey.

A leading pollster said the finding suggested that a pre-election rate hike could actually improve David Cameron's chances of staying in Downing Street, rather than damaging them, as is widely thought.

Some 31 per cent of those questioned by YouGov for The Times said that a rise in interest rates would leave them personally better-off, against 23 per cent who said they would be better off with lower rates and 32 per cent who thought it would make little difference either way.

...

A rise in interest rates would hit mortgage-holders, making it more difficult for home-owners to pay back loans. But it would be good for savers, particularly pensioners who have suffered from poor rates of return on their nest-eggs over the period since the crash of 2008.

I can readily believe that the banks would hike mortgage rates in an instant.  I am a lot more sanguine, however, about the proposition that interest rates for savers would go up as quickly  

The Ebenezer Scrooge de nos jours

According to Wikipedia, Scrooge is 'a cold-hearted, tight-fisted and greedy man, who despises Christmas. Dickens describes him thus: "The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and he spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice ..."'.  He is 'a coldhearted miser with nothing but contempt for the poor, and who despises Christmas as a "humbug"'.

In this season of goodwill to all men, there is one politician who appears to be making a deliberate attempt to adopt Scrooge's mantle.  The Observer reports:

Iain Duncan Smith, the embattled work and pensions secretary, is refusing to meet leaders of the rapidly expanding Christian charity that has set up more than 400 food banks across the UK, claiming it is "scaremongering" and has a clear political agenda.

...

Duncan Smith began his reply by criticising the "political messaging of your organisation", which "despite claiming to be nonpartisan" had "repeatedly sought to link the growth in your network to welfare reform". He said his department's record in processing benefit claims had improved and should do so further with the introduction of universal credit.

He rejected any suggestion that the government was to blame. "I strongly refute this claim and would politely ask you to stop scaremongering in this way. I understand that a feature of your business model must require you to continuously achieve publicity, but I'm concerned that you are now seeking to do this by making your political opposition to welfare reform overtly clear."

The standoff will further anger church leaders who were incensed by reports last week that the government had turned down a potential pot of £22m of EU funding for food banks, on the grounds that the UK did not want to be told by Brussels how to spend money for European structural funds.

In Dickens' novel, Scrooge eventually sees the error of his ways, persuaded by the three Ghosts of Christmas.  I regret to say that Duncan Smith is unlikely to be amenable to ghostly intervention.

     

Some you win, some you lose

It's just that I always seem to lose more than I win:

Top 5 FTSE 100 performing shares 2013

Intl Consolidated AI +106.439%

EasyJet plc +96.21%

Hargreaves Lansdown +90.495%

Sports Direct International +86.417%

ITV plc +79.761%

Nope.   Didn't pick any of them.

Bottom 5 FTSE 100 performing shares 2013

Fresnillo plc -60.030%

Antofagasta plc -37.643%

Randgold Resources -33.92%

Tullow Oil -33.902%

Anglo American plc -32.682%

Yes, I spent money on three of them.

That'll teach me some humility.

 

What was all that about?

Procrastination.  Prevarication.  Why make a decision today when you can leave it until tomorrow?  If it's that important, it can wait.

There are still three possible sites for new London airport runways: at Heathrow, Gatwick or the Thames estuary. The news is at least a quarter of a century old. Connoisseurs of British indecision will greet Sir Howard Davies's announcement on Tuesday as an all-time, blue-chip, 24-carat masterpiece of the genre. We are back where we started.

...

Half a century of inquiry has sought new runways for London, while Birmingham, Manchester and other airports have quietly expanded. Each new outburst of London airport hysteria sends politicians running for the hills of indecision. After Tuesday, those hills are more crowded than ever.

As Phil Ochs put it:

Oh, the shadows of doubt are in many a mind

Lookin' for an answer they're never gonna find

But they'd better decide 'cause they're runnin' out of time

For these are the days of decision

Or not, as the case may be.

Panicked xenophobia

A bit late, perhaps?  And would it not be illegal to impose separate rules discriminating against EU migrants, compared with domestic claimants?  The Guardian reports:

David Cameron is rushing through a block on European Union migrants' access to benefits from 1 January, the politically fraught date when the remaining work restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians will be lifted in the UK.

From New Year's Day all jobseekers from the EU will have to wait for three months from their arrival in the UK before they can apply to claim any out of work benefits, Downing Street announced.

The scrambled clampdown betrays the extreme nervousness in Downing Street at the possible reaction of potential Tory voters – and increasingly restive Tory backbenchers – if the public decide ministers have failed to take every measure possible to prevent Romanians and Bulgarians travelling to Britain en masse.

David Cameron said he believed the restrictions would "make the UK a less attractive place for EU migrants who want to come here and try to live off the state".The prime minister added that he wanted to "send the clear message that whilst Britain is very much open for business, we will not welcome people who don't want to contribute".

Is there any evidence that Bulgarians and Romanians will come to the UK in order to claim benefits?

This lady deserves whatever success comes her way

The Guardian reports:

Celebrity chefs are off the menu for a supermarket which has chosen one of the faces of austerity Britain as its new advertising star.

Jack Monroe, a 25-year-old single mother whose stories of struggling to feed her son for £10 a week while on benefits have propelled her to national fame, will front Sainsbury's new campaign from next month.

Her splendid blog is here.

   

It's a flea-bite

The Guardian reports:

Lloyds Banking Group has been fined £28m for putting branch staff under such pressure to sell products in order to claim bonuses or avoid being demoted that they may have mis-sold them to customers.

£28 million may sound like a lot of money, but it is peanuts to Lloyds.  With annual revenues of over £34 billion and a net loss of £1.43 billion, the odd £28 million is neither here nor there.  Even with the additional bill for compensation, Lloyds admits the effect will not be material.

Lloyds says it expects to spend up to £200m settling the fine and other issues involved. It says this won't have a "material impact on the group", but it is likely to hit the bank's profitability and as part owners that means taxpayers will take a hit.

Hummph.  As the taxpayers have yet to see any dividend returns on their investment, any "hit" that they suffer is entirely notional.  In any case, as part owners of the bank, they or their representatives (are you listening Treasury?) should have been aware of what was going on, and put a stop to it.

So will the fine deter them from repeating their alleged crimes?  Do pigs fly?


 

The Scottish health police would be appalled

I went down to the tobacco shop yesterday to buy stamps.  In Spain, cigarettes and stamps are sold, more or less exclusively, in special shops, rather than in supermarkets or post offices.

It is my habit to visit the local tobacco shop once a month where I buy three cartons of ciggies (at a price considerably below that in the UK).  The cigarette packets are much the same as in the UK, although the admonitions (Fumar Mata) are of course in Spanish.

For most of this year, my preferred brand has been on special offer, which means that - as the prices are set by central government - my three cartons comes with a half-bottle of Smirnoff vodka at no extra charge.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), vodka is not one of my favourite tipples,  So my drinks cabinet now sits proudly in the corner, displaying eight half-bottles of vodka.  Now I need only find someone to whom I can give them away.

I suppose the authorities in Scotland would look askance at any proposals to give away free booze with ciggies.  Shame really ...