July 3, 2009
A further formal apology
A few days ago I published the following apology over comments I had made likening Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson & our Labour Government to a bunch of Nazis
I wish to make an unreserved retraction of those comments because it is now clear to me that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet & government bears no resemblance that of Nazi Germany’s
I would like to reiterate that apology once more this morning
Piccies from Peter & more of the same from Double Tapper
July 1, 2009
This is how you do it
This glorious insult is from an era before the English language was boiled down to 4-letter words...
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
Found by Alan
A government climbdown? Not for long
Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports. The cards were due to be trialled there - sparking trade union anger.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said that the reverse in policy was "an absurd fudge" and "symbolic of a government in chaos". But Mr Johnson said the ID card scheme was still very much alive - despite Tory and Lib Dem calls to scrap it.
He said the national roll-out of a voluntary scheme was being speeded-up - with London to get them a year early in 2010 and over-75s to get free cards
A national roll-out of a voluntary scheme ... what's the bl*ody point ... or to look at it slightly differently, voluntary but for how long?
June 30, 2009
Some Iraq War food for thought
Found by Richard
John Kampfner unveils the ignominious truth about Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq inquiry and reveals Peter Mandelson’s demand, when Brown’s future hung in the balance in early June, that the hearings be held in private. Even now Mandelson’s priority is to protect Brand Blair
The charge sheet is long and yet the dock is empty. One of the most extraordinary aspects of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war has been the ability of those responsible to evade any form of reckoning. For that they have many people to thank, including incurious journalists and pliant judges. But most of all, Tony Blair is in debt to his New Labour friends for their efforts to get him off the hook — in recent days, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown.
At each step of the way, Blair and his allies have outmanoeuvred their opponents. The death of Dr David Kelly in 2003 provided ministers, and particularly Alastair Campbell, with some of their worst moments. The emails, the hubris and the deceit would have done for many a world leader. Instead, thanks to some artful bullying by Campbell and the brilliant recommendation by Mandelson (drawing on his experience as Northern Ireland Secretary) to appoint Lord Hutton, it was the BBC and not the government that took the flak.
That was that, declared a smiling Blair. The government had been exonerated. A year later, faced with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the prime minister then called upon Lord Butler of Brockwell. He made sure the terms of reference were as narrow as possible. Unlike the theatrical testimony before Hutton, Butler’s team met in private. As the only journalist called to appear before them, I took a close interest in the way they carried out their investigation. Their manner was Establishment-polite, but their questioning was refreshingly direct. One of the most impressive members of the team was a certain Sir John Chilcot. They asked me to elaborate on a number of revelations in my book, Blair’s Wars. They then asked me straight out if I believed Blair had lied. I replied that I did not suspect he had gone out of his way to tell falsehoods, but that, knowing the intelligence did not stack up to justify war, he willed the facts to fit. I considered my answer to be quite clever at the time. I now wish I had been a little less clever and a lot smarter.
Butler’s conclusions were coruscating but couched in mandarin-speak. Of the so-called dodgy dossier, he said it went to the outer limits of the intelligence available. He recorded surprise that, in spite of the ‘generally negative’ results of the UN inspectors, the quality of British intelligence was not reassessed. We found out only afterwards that Downing Street had prevailed on Butler to water down the most important passages.
What mattered was the press conference that accompanied the launch. Butler had the prime minister’s fate in his fingers. He decided beforehand that he would not give an opinion as to whether Blair should resign. Remarkably, nobody thought of asking him. Instead Butler said he did not hold any single individual responsible for the failures in intelligence. Within seconds, the Downing Street spin operation went into overdrive, thanking the eminent privy councillors for their work, insisting that their recommendations would be given all due weight, but celebrating the fact that they had been let off the hook once again. Butler would later regret his timidity.
As the occupation went from bad to worse, as the full extent of the government’s deceptions were revealed in the UK and in the US — American journalists were slower off the mark, but then continued to probe after most of their British counterparts had lost interest — Blair fended off all accusations. He insisted, insouciantly, that these two inquiries, plus probes by two hapless parliamentary committees, had ‘vindicated’ ministers and that it was time to ‘move on’.
And what of Brown? Far too little has been written about his role in the Iraq adventure. In 2002-03, the Chancellor was keen to ensure that his team talked to me for my book. They knew that many senior figures in Number 10, the Foreign Office and the military were co-operating and wanted to ensure their message got across. They were keen, under the cloak of anonymity, to portray the run-up to war as one of those examples of Blairite exuberance. Just wait for a serious prime minister, a professional, to take over, and all this kow-towing to the Americans, all this gunslinging would be a thing of the past. At no point, however, during the fraught meetings that led to war did Brown give anything but fulsome support to Blair. Not once did he seriously question the evidence. Not for him was the sifting through the intelligence material or the cross-questioning of the intelligence chiefs that Robin Cook undertook.
Indeed, one could argue that Brown’s role in the war effort was even more inglorious than Blair’s. He wanted it to be known that he had his misgivings, but he never aired them in public because at the same time he did not want to get on the wrong side of the many newspaper editors who were gung-ho for war. This was a piece of characteristic political calculation. In 2005, when Blair’s back was against the wall, and Alan Milburn’s general election strategy had stalled, Brown portrayed himself as the saviour of the campaign. When asked during a photo call whether he believed Blair had any case to answer for the war, he said emphatically he did not. In 2007, as he carried out his putsch, Brown was keen that the war formed a backdrop for Labour MPs’ discontent with Blair. He promised a new inquiry, with the implication that, this time, it would get to the truth. Once in power, he insisted that such an investigation should take place only after British forces had quit Basra.
Fast forward to June 2009: with his own back to the wall, Brown turned to the same forces that had on more than one occasion helped save Blair — Mandelson and Campbell. Mandelson’s vital role in the period between the local elections and the Monday after the announcement of the European results is well documented. In return for securing the loyalty of wavering Cabinet ministers, the prince of darkness secured his 30-word job title, one of the largest departments in Whitehall history and confirmation of his status as the number two in government. Not known until now is one vital part of their negotiation. Mandelson — on Blair’s behalf — set down specific conditions for the Iraq war inquiry. The deal, I am told, was explicit. Not only would the hearings be fully in private, but the committee would, as with Hutton, be manageable. Brown was instructed to ensure that the members of the inquiry would, in the words of one official, ‘not stir the horses’. Brown readily acquiesced. He was not in a position to do anything else. It was a done deal, even before James Purnell sent alarm bells through Downing Street with his resignation on the night of 4 June.
Brown, Blair and Mandelson were quite prepared for the fury of the anti-war brigade, the Guardianistas, as people like myself are referred to. The New Labour project was, after all, conceived on the idea of embracing important figures on the right and discarding people on the liberal left who care about issues such as civil liberties and ethics in foreign policy. They were surprised, however, by the number of great and good in Whitehall and the armed forces who denounced the idea of an inquiry in private. A number of figures in Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Cabinet were unhappy with this arrangement. Ed Balls, for long Brown’s closest confidant but hardly a soulmate of Mandelson’s, was one of the first to express his misgivings in public. David Miliband accepted the terms, but was not altogether pleased.
Brown and Mandelson should have anticipated the concern of the military top brass. Many of these figures have long been furious about the government’s approach to Iraq. I saw this for myself, in microcosm, in the autumn of 2003. I was visiting an officers’ college, as part of my book promotional tour. I decided to tone down my standard introductory remarks in order not to come across as offensive and unpatriotic. I completely misread my audience. They were vituperative, under the cloak of ‘Chatham House rules’, about Blair’s massaging of the intelligence, about the lack of military preparedness, the lack of planning for the occupation, amid a general sense that soldiers were being sent to die for party political gain. That is the message Blair has been desperate to avoid being aired in public.
Thanks to the likes of General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the Army during the invasion, the present holder of the post, General Sir Richard Dannatt, and Butler, the new inquiry will be largely held in public. While some of the inquiry members are unlikely to cause Brown and Blair any fuss, one or two, notably Sir Roderic Lyne, a former British ambassador to Moscow, are made of sterner stuff.
Chilcot has now made clear that as much as possible will be held in the open. However, watch carefully for the machinations, for the attempts made to exclude various witnesses and statements from public hearings. Watch for the attempts by Blair and those close to him to set the terms for their involvement. And watch for the role of Downing Street, as the general election becomes closer, to delay sensitive testimony until long after the players have disappeared from the scene
As he worked to secure the job he craved, Brown saw the promise of an Iraq inquiry as a means of casting aside his friend (and briefly foe). He has no more interest in eking out the truth on the war than any of the others who went along with it. Mandelson’s involvement in this affair is more complicated. He has personally less to hide than Blair, Campbell and the others who were intimately engaged in the war planning. His motivation hinges around preserving the Blair Brand that he was instrumental in creating. He agreed a year ago to join Brown’s Cabinet in order to ensure that the Brand was not sullied. He agreed to prop up the Prime Minister earlier this month in order to ensure that the Brand was not completely destroyed.
The man who presided over the greatest foreign policy calamity of more than half a century has still not been nailed for it, and will not be nailed for it. For that he has his friends to thank.
June 26, 2009
Mud, money & festival free enterprise (Reprised)
I know that I continually get accused of living in the past but I can help but comparing the young men that appear in our In This Day entries with the slack jawed Playstation obsessed yoof of today, who also seem to wallow in the mud … but on the mud of the Somme. That has been replaced by the mud of Glastonbury, which takes place this weekend . This means by now just about every Vets surgery in South West England has been stripped of Ketamine
Lucky for the young'uns, these days the heavy metal isn’t red hot shrapnel fired by the Boche at our grandfathers when then were that age – it’s a sheeeeeeeek of equally long haired chavs with laces undone & tousers halfway down to their ankles, belting the merry hell out of some electric guitars with lumps of lead piping … & there was me thinking that white noise was what they subjected you to during resistance to interegation training. I am starting to feel my age
Now it isnt just your humble corrspondent who is somewhat bemused by the whole Glastonbury vibe. Clarkson-san, writing in The Times …
On Friday morning my wife got dressed up like Worzel Gummidge, put some bog roll in a bag and roared off in her Aston Martin to watch a bunch of useless teenagers singing in the rain at Glastonbury. I think she may have gone mad. And she’s not alone. Helicopter companies all over the southwest have reported a booming demand for charters. Everyone in the de luxe tenting business is now on a beach in Barbados and all last week Brixton was doubtless awash with hedge fund managers and BBC programme controllers trying to buy drugs.
And getting the wrong sort. “Yeah, man. You gotta try some of this horse tranquilliser. It’ll even you out.” Honestly, I bet that this morning Glastonbury is full to overflowing with your accountant calling all the policemen pigs and trying to reverse onto a selection of other men, having ingested six gallons of crystal meth.
I understand the mentality, of course. You’re middle aged. You have children. Your life is so boring you actually look forward to the arrival of the milkman. And you fancy, for just one weekend, the idea of transporting yourself from the humdrum and into the fetid sleeping bag of your youth.
I have no problem with that. I’m not going to spend the next foot of newsprint berating you for not acting your age and laughing at you as you try to remember how to roll a joint. But I do have a problem with Glastonbury.
Now whilst getting soaked to the skin whilst sewage contaminated mud swills over the tops of your wellies might not be your idea of fun, but the whole Glasto concept is one that we should all embrace … & why, might come as a little surprise. Forget all the tie dye hippy Nu-Earth festival nonesense that get trotted out on occasions, what Gastonbury is all about & make no mistake about this, is not naked new age travellers – its bare faced CAPITALISM.
The Somerset ‘levels’ has, well to put it politely, a very limited genetic pool – eleven toes is pretty much the norm & opposed thumbs a novelty. Yet one farmer has sought ride pretty much roughshod over the UK’s inequitous planning system, to redeploy one of the factors of production more efficently & produce a global brand in the process. How much is a ticket, £150? Nearly 180,0000 people pay that to go & stand in a waterlogged field. That’s over 25 million quid in turnover. Talk about diversification of agricultureal income streams. With that sort of cashflow you don’t need to worry about trying to get permission to convert the old cow sheds to holiday homes
& what does all this money produce? People travel huge distances to establish a new community where all kinds of trade & commerce take place on land that was previously, much less productive. No figures are available for what is produced in three days in terms of GDP but I will bet you penny to a pound that is sure beats goat farming.
The whole event has changed over the years form when it started as a haven for refugees from the 1960’s & the brand has refined itself. These days local lads charge £50 a time to pull BMWs out of the car park gloop with their tractors. Hells teeth, the place requires a 30 MW power supply to keep peoples iPods & mobile phones charged – that’s about what the City of Bath consumes. So much for the carbon footprint,eh? Want a colestoral free fairtrade yak burger? £8.50 & yes sir, we do accept Amex.
So this morning dear readers, we applude the free enterprise of this business model & we embrace the concept of relieving stupid people of large amounts of cash so that they can go & sink in the mire. They do so of their own volition but let’s just be sure that we Hoover their wallets on the way. Forget Flanders, that never turned a profit. & before anyone asks, next year the Free Market Corporation will be taking a trade stand to peddle useless wares to the terminally stupid.
As Gordon Gekko so perceptively pointed out, it isnt that the fool & his money are soon parted, it’s a miricle that they even got together in the first place & no doubt our exclusive range of wellington boots (bought from the local farm shop for a fiver a pair) will sell very very well at the special festival offer price of £40
June 25, 2009
Just when you thought that the expenses row was dying down...(Updated)
The BBC is poised to provoke a fresh row over expenses by refusing to disclose how much its executives spend on entertainment for their stars. Days after MPs caused public outrage by blacking out details of their expenses, the BBC is refusing to reveal how much is spent on hospitality and gifts for its best-paid celebrities
& if you want a example of the supreme arrogance & the complete & utter distain that the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation treats everyone including the taxpayers that fund it...
The BBC has repeatedly used freedom of information exemptions to block inquiries about staff pay and expenses, refusing even to tell the National Audit Office how much its radio presenters were paid
Mind you, to give this post a spot of editorial balance – something that the BBC has lacked for years - let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective
The Corporation is to publish claims by senior executives, some totalling more than £1,000 a month, amid accusations that it is wasting millions of pounds of public funds
A grand on month on your X’s ? That isn’t wasting huge amounts of money, that’s simply gay. The boys clearly need a Free Market Masterclass on how to properly roust an expense account. & to put that assertion into context, when I get into the office this morning, I shall ask go & have a word with my Accounts Department & see what my expenses were for 2008. My bet is that they must have been in the region of £100,000 - £150,000. That’s how a proper chap beasts his expense account
Update: Lunch today which I paid for was £603.05 including tip. I also got a printout of my expenses for last year & I was a long way wide of the mark with my estimate of this morning ... they were a lot lot more
June 24, 2009
Is John Bercow a metaphor for the Conservative Party?
The question that is being asked in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster today is not to what extent will the new speaker of the House of Commons seek reform or indeed has he reformed from his right wing past, it relates to his trouble & strife, Sally Bercow...
Hot or not?
Aside from Mrs Bercow’s score on the MILF-o-meter, dear dear Johnny is quite an interesting character as even the most perfunctory look at his record reveals
If anyone deserves the title of "son of Tebbit" it is John Bercow, the Tory MP for Buckingham. A pint sized chap with short arms and endless ambitions, his biting Commons performances and his win in 1997 against the grain of Tory losses catapulted him from the backbenches into Ann Widdecombe's home affairs team, despite his record as a former member of the far-right Monday Club
There is one difference between Norman Tebbit and John Bercow. John's father did not need to "get on his bike" because he was a minicab driver. Otherwise, everything Mr Bercow does reminds old timers of Mr Tebbit: a savage political streetfighter
Prior to all of that Bercow had been national chairman of the ultra-right Federation of Conservative Students in 1986. These days he is in the political middle centre ground, married to a Labour supporter & nearly crossed the floor to join the evil empire a couple of years ago
It’s all rather like the Tory Party itself – not so long ago it was committed to individual freedom & low taxes – these days it feels as though it has to compete for what is laughably known as the centre ground... European socialist democracy by any other name. The parabola of Bercow’s political views seem to have followed the sorry path trodden by the Conservative Party - & despite a promising start, ended up just another Westminster jobsworth those name remains very much on The List until such time as his merit is otherwise proven
June 23, 2009
The croissant issue
Again, a little follow up ... but this time its last weeks disastrous conference theatre workshop utter load of old the b*llocks : the croissants were pretty good. Even better were these little puff pastry thing-a-mes that had sausages in ‘em. Smeared with mustard & Sauce OR* they were definitely the highpoint of the day
I hope that clears that point up to your satisfaction. Sadly I don’t suspect that I will we invited back to sample them again
*Sauce OR:– Sauce, Other Ranks; HP Sauce
June 19, 2009
A formal apology
Earlier this week I published what I thought at the time was a whimsical piece comparing the unelected First Secretary of State the Right Honourable the Lord Mandelson PC, with the democratically elected Adolf Hilter. I am deeply sorry & embarrassed to have compared British Labour Party of 2009 with the German National Socialist Party of 1939. I wish to make an unreserved retraction of those comments because it is now clear to me that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet & government bears no resemblance that of Nazi Germany’s
I realise that such comparisons are completely incorrect, have no basis whatsoever in fact. The Policies that the Labour Party have pursued since 1997 have at no time sought to discriminate against certain sections of society to the advantage of others.
I therefore redact my previous erroneous comments without limitation & hereby undertake not to be nasty about law abiding politicians again. Not.
& yes, it was worse than even my most pessimistic predictions
So the first question on the day was that we were all asked what was the single largest issue that would face the capital markets over the next 10 to 15 years...
Academic No.1: Climate change
Fund Manager No.1: I completely agree
Banker No.1: & to add to that, corporate & social responsibility
Broad murmers of agreement
YHC (in already agitated tone): No its not & in fact thats all utter utter tosh. The single biggest issue that faces the market is that over the last 24 months we have been responsible for the destruction of hundreds of billions of pounds of investor & shareholder value
Cue collective intakes of breath
Clearly none of you sit in the same investor meetings that I do but three of my large institutional shareholders are represented around this table & I can assure you all that they dont give a stuff if baby penguins drown, all they want to know is how we propose to earn back the money we have lost
At this point one or two of the delegates actually hissed me. Funny & lets just say that I went on more a wee while longer...
If what are laughably known as industry leaders are more interested in the next tree hug-a-thon than creating shareholder value, the economy is in much worse shape than indicators show. Let’s just say that I don’t think that I am going to be invited back anytime soon
June 18, 2009
When horizon scanning no longer has anything to do with U-boats
This morning you find me en-route to some one day beano that has been organised by one of the business information services & a firm of consultants. However these are not ordinary consultants as a swift check of their website revealed last night. These people
are a strategic futures consultancy helping clients to anticipate, interpret and act upon important developments in the external world
Among a lot & I do mean a lot to jargon it would appear that they specialise in strategic facilitation as well as horizon scanning. I really hope that that means they serve decent croissants at breakfast because I really fancy a couple of really good croissants for breakfast this morning when the 20 industry leaders that have been invited take a break from shaping the market to 2020 & beyond.
Even more intriguing is that I will personally help this shaping of the market by employing outside-in-thinking. Gosh! So I have promised the boss that I will be on my best behaviour & be a good corporate robot, even if it is just for one day. However I swear that I one of these shinny suited consultants uses the term horizon scanning just once, I am going to kill everyone in the room
June 17, 2009
How they spend our money
MPs on the justice select committee were supposed to be going to South Africa - to find out more about prisons - on a five-day trip next week. It’s purely a “co-incidence” that they would have been there for the Lions tour of SA, according to officials. Naturally. But sport-loving MPs may now be rather unhappy that the trip has been cancelled because of the Speaker’s election
Its a real shame that actually doing the job you were elected to do gets in the way of all the freebees - mind you, the other week when the House of Commons was supposed to be debating defence, only 10 MPs bothered to turn up...
With breathtaking cynicism, the Government arranged for the annual Commons debate on "Defence and the World' to take place last Thursday, to coincide with polling day in the local and Euro-elections. This, and the hysteria over our incredible exploding Government, ensured that only 10 MPs turned up. These included just one Labour backbencher, someone called Madeleine Moon, who assured the House that the only reason why Europe has been at peace since 1945 was the creation of the European Union (she is apparently too young to have heard of Nato)
Just two more reasons, as if we needed them, for the lynching to start
June 16, 2009
Something to ponder over your Corn Flakes
The European famine in the 1840s forced farmers into other activities which helped catalyse the first Industrial Revolution
Widespread unemployment during the Great Depression during the 1930s pushed workers into new sectors which ultimately created the Service Economy of the second half of the 20th Century
During the 1970s downturn, two of the giants of computing - Apple & Microsoft - were born, ushering in the Information Age
I wonder what the legacy of the current global economic difficulties will be?
June 12, 2009
Red skoi at noight, get orf moi laaaaand
There is no justice at the Ministry of Justice & certainly no culture at that Ministry - therefore this shouldn't come as any surprise....
New Farming Minister appointed to champion ailing livestock industry is a vegetarian (and so is the man he reports to) He's been appointed to champion the ailing livestock industry. But Labour's new Farming Minister might have to wrestle with his conscience as he does so. He's a vegetarian. Jim Fitzpatrick, also a fierce opponent of hunting, will report to Environment Secretary Hilary Benn - who does not eat meat either.
However I hear that our new minister is visiting the Vale next week so I have been making a few small modifications to the trusty old tractor in preparation
June 9, 2009
Kann I Park meine panzers im Parlaments-Quadrat, bitte?
I have to confess that whilst I didn’t vote for the British Nationalsozialistische Party in the recent elections that we have all so enjoyed, it was a damn close run thing. It’s not that your humble correspondent has any truck with ‘Der Dicke’ Nasty Nick & his ersatz Nazis, it just that at the moment, the more that the Westminster untermensch tell me not to do anything – damn it, the more likely I am to do it
The Tories won with 28.6 per cent, but the most symbolic results were the two seats won by the British National Party in the North West region, by party leader Nick Griffin, and in the Yorkshire and Humber area. It was the first time the party had won seats at national elections
Mr Griffin said that his party had gained from Labour's failures: "It is a historic breakthrough. It is a great moment for democracy." But Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said: "It is a sad moment... We have got to understand why people have voted for the BNP. We should redouble our determination to take them on and take them out of British politics."
Lets just take a step back from the histrionics emanating from the bowls of the Palace of Westminster in those five minutes a day when our MP’s are not making spurious expenses claims, on Mr. Hilter’s Lebensraum–o-meter, our Birmingham Braunhemden really aren’t terribly good: they don’t even have decent uniforms. Bandenbekämpfung is all well & good if you are playing Scrabble, but if you don’t at least get to wear some highly polished Eastern Europe oppressing jackboots, you are never going to get it on a triple word score.
As for Gleichschaltung, the Toxteth Totenkopf can’t even spell rassenhygiene ... & yet apparently Gauleiter Andrew ‘Blut und Boden’ Brons is the greatest threat to Parliamentary democracy since Nu Labour were elected in 1997 lo-alcohol lager was introduced
Some Labour MPs have said the election of BNP members would be an indictment of Mr Brown’s premiership. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, last week said it would be a “day of shame” for Britain
& there was me thinking that the British National Party was a properly constituted political party, whose electoral ambitions & activities be they Kameradschafts und Gemeinschaftsstärkung or otherwise, are over seen by The Electoral Commission.
In fact when it comes to the assertion made by that uber-numpty Miliband (may he enjoy a long debilitating & painful death for his crimes against the Ermächtigungsgesetz) - I have tried doing the Google thing for a couple of hours but I can’t find record of any Griffin’s crypto- Verfügungstruppe claiming for moat extensions, duck houses, faux mortgage payments or (ahem) adult movies such as Red Nights of the Gestapo. This is more than can be said for the Tories, ZaNu Liebour & the la la Liberals.
However its worth considering that under the Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten, the Brown Creed meant one thing: under the one eyed Scottish git, it means quite another. Then again we now have a completely unelected Deputy Prime Minister “First Secretary of State” & when it comes to Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson, the Brown Creed means something altogether quite different...
June 8, 2009
European Election Results (Updated)
Labour could be on course to dip below 20% of the vote ...
Labour's Harriet Harman told the BBC: "We are bracing ourselves for very dismal results, there is no doubt about that."
Ha ha ha
Monday morning update: Labour was beaten into third place by the UK Independence Party, securing only 15.3% of the vote
Ha ha ha ha
June 4, 2009
& this evening
James Purnell ( he of fake photo fame )
has stepped down from the cabinet and told Prime Minister Gordon Brown to "stand aside". In a letter to the Sun and the Times, the work and pensions secretary said he was not seeking the leadership but wanted to trigger a debate. Mr Purnell is the third cabinet member to announce in the past few days they are standing down from cabinet.
Ha ha ha ha ha !
Benefit Fraud
From the Department of Work & Pensions website
Deliberately withholding information that affects your claim is stealing. That’s why we are targeting benefit thieves! The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) takes benefit theft very seriously. Although the vast majority of people who claim benefits are honest, those who steal benefits are picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers
& thanks to reader HR, we can see an advanced draft of the DWP's new advertisment
In fact there is even an online form for reporting fraudsters
June 3, 2009
June 2, 2009
Half a dozen shotguns in the Land Rover, ready for the call to arms
Via Kim, this excellent summary of foul deeds at Westminster from Mr Alawsat
Is England on the verge of revolution? To those who know this most peaceful of nations intimately, the question is bound to sound bizarre. Boasting attachment to the rule of law and democratic government, the English have not had a revolution since the 17th century. Nevertheless, these days it is hard to be in the company of Englishmen without hearing talk of the need, indeed the imminence, of revolution.
However his is oh so wrong when he aserts
England may not experience a classical revolution with barricades and gallows in public places.
Forget the European & local elections later this week, some of us already have cached several years supply of canned food & grain alcohol because food supplies might be disrupted once we march on the Westminster Village
June 1, 2009
The Lord loves a good hanging
Regulars will know the I regularly advocate the wholesale lynching of Members of Parliament & that I normally accompany such statements with a suitable graphic. After all, we can but dream. However last week, The Times carried the following cartoon...
Can we conclude from this that mainstream opinion is starting to move towards your humble correspondent’s?
May 26, 2009
Bombs
Finally, I believe that my next hundred days will be so successful I will be able to complete them in 72 days. (cue adoring sycophantic laughter from the audience) And on the 73rd day, I will rest. (cue unrestrained adulation from the impartial media )
North Korea says it has staged a "successful" underground nuclear test, prompting international condemnation
So Mr President chappie, you're the big man...what are you going to fella?
(Hint: Why not ask the one-eyed Scottish git what to do? After all, he is always having to save the World.)
May 20, 2009
Giz a job
Following from my recent post on the role of the National Audit Office in contemporary government I am pleased to report that as opposed to being appointed as Inquisitor Generalis for Life, Torquemada Free Market is prepared to accept the recently vacated post of Speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Frankly Mr Torquemada doesn’t really care if the post doesn’t become vacant for another month, the sooner that we repatriate without right of return, yet another corrupt Scottish socialist, the better.
I suspect that your humble correspondent isn’t alone in being horrified at the systemic financial abuse (although not really surprised) while also now being rather fed up with the daily tsunami of salacious revelations. Therefore immediately upon being confirmed as Speaker, I would thank the Daily Torygraph for the excellent work that it has done to date. However the public demands a swift & final conclusion to any unfinished business. Therefore I hereby & in public declare that this insidious situation will be brought to an expeditious conclusion.
As for the likes of Gorbals Mick & every other piece of bottom feeding Westminster pondlife that has been on the take for years & years – you can forget your job, any as yet unpaid expense claims & then there will be the not insubstantial matter of those fat public sector pensions. They can forget those to boot & should any Westminster Villager have the temerity to try & sue, the mood we are in at the moment, we won’t string ‘em up after the trial, we will lynch every one of the ba*tards over the Court steps, on the way in.
I always try to be as self effacing as possible however once again I offer the long suffering British public a swift & simple solution to a seemingly intractable problem: & one that will save the taxpayer money to boot. I can do no more than that
May 19, 2009
Ceylonese round up
So what about those Tamil nobbers that insist of protesting in blocking Parliament Square over something that has nothing to do with this country. If their government wants to bomb the b’jesus out of its own civilians, my only concern is that said government is using munitions that have been supplied by Armscos that I own shares in
However sticking with the Ceylonese theme for just a moment, there seem to be even more numpties in Colombo . Why the hell are you burning effigies of David Miliband when they should be torching that smarmy little runt himself?
For goodness sake if that’s the best that you can manage, no wonder you took you 26 years to beat terrorists whose main claim to fame seems to be considering the comedy moustache to be the height of sartorial elegance
The Scottish hegemony might like to take note
We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle
Winston Churchill
May 13, 2009
"You are whoremasters and drunkards, corrupt and unjust men, how can you be a Parliament for God’s People? "
As much as it loath Tory Boy Cameron along with just about any other High Tory you care to mention he has thus far, just about kept ahead of the tsunami of sleaze revelations that are consuming the Westminster Trough...
David Cameron today warned Tory MPs to pay back dodgy' expenses or be sacked.The Conservative leader ordered shadow ministers and grandees alike to repay any claims that failed a “smell test”.
However, as any visitor to the Palace of Westminster will know, right outside is a rather prominent statue of Oliver Cromwell & tonight I can’t but recall the words he used to dismiss the Rump Parliament in April 1653…
Come come!. We have had enough of this. I will put an end to your prating. It is not fit that you should sit here any longer! You have sat here too long here for any good you have been doing lately. You shall give this place to better men! Call them in! Call them in! (the musketeers). You call yourselves a Parliament. You are no Parliament; I say you are no Parliament! You are whoremasters and drunkards, corrupt and unjust men, how can you be a Parliament for God’s People? Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
As your humble correspondent remarked last summer, what price Cromwell today dear readers
Now the exact words that Cromwell used are not known, but this version is just as applicable
“...It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
“Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
“Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God's help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do.
“I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”
May 12, 2009
Snouts to the ready
The surprising thing about the whole MPs expenses scandal is that anyone is surprised about the Westminster Village’s profligacy – be it porno movies or swimming pool repairs – they simply can’t spend our money quickly enough in very much the same way that when it comes to policy, every pound of our taxes & more are simply spunked away each year on the latest political whim. & yesterday we had Brown, Cameron & Clegg all trying to say that they were sorry not because of what they & their chummies have done but because they have be caught, to so much with a hand in the cookie jar as looting the biscuit factory.
Despite the lamentations emanating from the bowls of Westminster, the thing that I don’t understand is the entire premise on which MPs are allowed to claim expenses. Because I am a reasonably bloody minded individual, I actually took the time to read my employers expenses policy yesterday afternoon. My, how I laughed! It states right at I top of page 1 that as an underlying principle, when it comes to personal expenses, an employee should be no better or worse off as a result of discharging his or her duties. I suspect that a lot of you have similar clauses in your respective employers T&Cs. Not so in the House of Commons on the Gravy Train & this is why come The Glorious Day, I shall be billing the taxpayer for every foot of rope that I use. I have a sneaking feeling that that that would be the one bill that, in the absence of corporate sponsorship, the overwhelming majority of the electorate wouldn’t mind ponying up for
May 6, 2009
Joanna Lumley: The next Mrs T?
30 years ago yesterday, Maggie moved into 10 Downing Street which is why, over the weekend, the papers were full of retrospectives ... well at least a few column inches covered that happiest part of our recent history: the rest of my Sunday Torygraph seemed to be devoted to dire predictions of the forthcoming flu pandemic that somewhat embarrassingly hasn’t really happened yet. Inconvenient I know, but I really don’t want to be drawn into making comparisons between killer swine flu & impending global environmental catastrophe – yes, I’m a bit of an old cynic but until the entire population of Bangladesh has been drowned I will continue to drive my Land Rover Globalwarmer. Once the entire population of Bangladesh is doing a passable imitation of the General Belgrano, it will be way too late for those tiresome Irish minstrels to hold a Snorkel Aid concert & we can send the newly reformed Black & Tans to sort of Sir Bob & Boneo once & for all. What a blessing that would be.
However to return to this mornings little theme, in the same way that Maggie (may blessings be upon her name) stormed into Westminster, for a few glorious moments last week, it looked like the redoubtable Ms Lumley might just do the same...
Given our complete lack of electoral choices, a party formed of retired Gurkhas led by Ms Lumley, standing for compulsory goat curry & promising to sort out our dumded down chav-culture with judicious use of their kukris would certainly get my unsteady tick in the box. Think of it as casting a protest vote – successive administrations have allowed once Great Britain to be overrun by just about every whinging ethnic minority load of bl**dy wogs with an open hand & a grievance you care to mention. However when it comes to those who have done nothing but loyally serve Her Majesty, the Westminster pondlife treat them with nothing but utter distain.
In fact, forget an electoral mandate, much better that Ms Lumley were to unleash both her & our anger upon Parliament, & let Johnny get well & truly stuck in. That might well help the Parliament Channel’s ratings.
May 5, 2009
May 1, 2009
Your Mayday Bank Holiday stock tips
Yesterday, Gweilicus sent me this....
So I called my stockbroker today and asked, "what do you recommend buying”? His answer: Canned goods and ammunition.
What with global financial meltdown & the impending flu pandemic, it has a particular pertinence however a swift review of the markets reveals that this stockbroker is right on the money because if you look at how both firearms manufacturers & Hormel (the makers of Spam in the US) have significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over the last quarter as pointed out by the Market Oracle
Exchange-traded examples include Sturm, Ruger & Company (RGR) and Smith & Wesson (SWHC). Smith & Wesson has been a doormat until recently. But both it and Ruger enjoyed nice moves in the past couple weeks. While Smith & Wesson has announced big plans for future growth, I prefer Ruger. Its revenues and earnings are increasing, and the company's backlog in orders jumped 72 percent from the 3rd quarter to the 4th quarter.
Why is the outlook improving for gun manufacturers? Maybe because while other industries are sliding down a slippery slope of lower demand, the output of U.S. small arms manufacturing is forecast to grow at an annual compounded rate of 2 percent between 2008 and 2013, as seen on the following chart …
& canned goods?
Hormel's net earnings fell 8 percent in the most recent quarter … but it still delivered 60 cents a share, which was better than the 51 cents a share that analysts had expected. This was mainly due to sales of Spam and Hormel's Dinty Moore Stew, another product that is greater than the sum of its parts.
What's more … Hormel affirmed its 2009 earnings outlook, saying it still expected to earn $2.15 to $2.25 per share. And while other companies are ducking for cover from the recession, Hormel plans to spend more on advertising this year than it spent last year, in part to market new products. So Hormel is obviously optimistic about its future, despite a worsening recession.
Consumer confidence is the blue line on the bottom of the chart above. It plunged more than expected in February, falling to a new low of 25 — the worst level since the index began in 1967. And it's dragging the S&P 500 down with it … and that makes Hormel, Ruger and gold look all the better
April 29, 2009
Wednesdays star of the day is ... Michael O’Leary
...for this
The outspoken head of the Irish budget airline Ryanair has dismissed apocalyptic warnings of a global swine flu pandemic, saying that the virus was only a risk to Asians and Mexicans “living in slums”.
Of course, never having had the pleasure of flying Ryanair, I still hold Mr O'Leary in high regard
MPs expenses & a money making idea
Continuing tonight’s porcine theme, can we just for a moment turn the spotlight of commonsense on the continuing debacle that surrounds MP’s expenses & allowances – because these people have had their snouts in the trough for way to long for my liking & just about everybody else’s liking come to that. Frankly I really can’t see what is the problem with MPs having to provide receipts for the expenses that they claim... just as you have to do if you have a real job. Of course, the one thing that the Westminster Village pondlife hate above all else & that is being called to account for exactly where the money goes. I mean it’s not like it’s our money, is it?
Therefore tonight I would like to suggest the following very simply plan that not only will provide greater scrutiny of MPs expenditure & cut costs, it would also turn a profit for the taxpayer & it goes something like this...
1. With immediate effect, all of the many spineless Parliamentary committees that are supposed to monitor MPs allowances & expenses are to be wound up, their responsibilities & powers vested in the National Audit Office which will be renamed the Holy Office
2. The head of the NAO’s job title to be changed from Comptroller & Auditor General to Inquisitor Generalis
3. Torquemada Free Market to be appointed Inquisitor Generalis for Life. (In recognition of the length of his appointment, Torquemada hereby waives all rights to receive a salary in return for getting a cut of all of the savings/profits he makes)
4. The Inquistor Generalis will be empowered to delegate his inquisitorial faculties to other Inquisitors of his own choosing
5. The proceedings of the Holy Office will henceforth be televised, the television rights being sold to the highest bidder & the receipts to be rebated to the taxpayer (less the Inquisitor Generalis’s cut of course)
& now tell me that if some of the pondlife that inhabit the Westminster Village ended up like this on prime time...
... that we wouldn’t make a fortune from the advertising revenues & frankly it would make for much more compelling viewing than that Britain’s Got Talent load of old rubbish
April 28, 2009
Tax Nazis
It really doesn’t matter which way the statisticians want to cut it, at some time over the next year or so, Gordon Brown or maybe even his successor is going to face Gotterdamarung at the polls. The fact that politically Nu-Labour is finished hasn’t stopped its exponents pursuing its their amoral creed & poisonous ideology, for one moment.
Last week we saw the imposition of a top rate of income tax of 50% to which National Insurance contributions are added on. & this isn't to pay back the loans required to bale out its profligate economic policy, Brown & Darling in their socialist heart of hearts, hate the wealthy. Forget that poftah Manny’s assertion that Labour is relaxed about people having money ... trust me, they are not.
The new 50% band will be levied on the estimated 350,000 people with incomes above £150,000 a year – well not quite...
Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling imposed the controversial new 50p top rate of tax on higher earners despite an official Treasury prediction that more than two-thirds of people earning more than £150,000 would not pay it. A pre-Budget "modelling" exercise conducted by the Treasury forecast that 69 per cent of those hit by the new levy – to come in next year – would find ways of avoiding it. Yet ministers pressed ahead with the measure anyway.
So despite being advised that only approximately 108,500 people would pay this new pernicious tax, that grey haired twat Darling went ahead with it. The fact that it will raise next to no extra cash to pay off Labours debts isn't important - it is to punish the sucessful. & that isn’t my opinion, that is the view of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
But that was last week & its already water under the bridge money down the drain. This week its the ever ghastly Harriet Harman who is waging her brand of class war while she still can...
Harriet Harman is to unveil her Equalities Bill, which will dump another bucket-load of regulations upon businesses already struggling to keep their heads above water in the recession. Both developments advertise the final death throes of a government that has absolutely no idea how to run a country rather than run it into the ground.
The 50p tax rate has left the out-manoeuvred Blairites aghast for the very reasons that the fossilised Left is triumphant. By singling out the wealthy as scapegoats for the failure of government policy, it implicitly classifies as the enemies of society people whose efforts are essential to its prosperity... If the 50p rate was a symbolic signal of the death of New Labour, Harriet Harman is now driving a stake through its heart. For her Equalities Bill marries the class war to the gender war.
In exactly the same way that the Nazi’s killings didn’t stop even when their regime was in its death throes, Labour won’t call a halt to its attacks on the better off, even though their cause is now utterly lost. On a personal level, I am chuffed at being able to pay a lot more income tax to help cover Blair, Brown & Darlings' mistakes
April 27, 2009
Just Go
There is a petition asking Gordon Brown to resign as Prime Minister now listed on the Number 10 website which is getting a few signatures. When I signed, there were approx 10,000 signatures. I just wonder how many there will be by lunchtime
April 23, 2009
Bugg*red
Take a close look at the post above this & what Kipling wrote in 1920 has a special resonance this morning...
If, in spite of this, the domestic situation became too much for him he could always take a ship and go to sea, and there seek or impose the peace which the Papal Legate, or the Mediaeval Trade Union, or a profligate Chancellor of the Exchequer denied to him at home
Alistair Darling cited “fairness” as his motivation for raising income tax from next April for people earning more than £150,000 a year, cheering many Labour MPs but in doing so, breaking a manifesto commitment that there would be no raising of income tax in this Parliament. That’s how desperate Labour is.
It is a brazen attempt to rake in more cash from those who they deem can afford it under the guise of "fairness."
The Labour government started with Peter Mandelson saying the party was intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich. Now, as the administration heads towards terminal decay, the Labour Party, with its 50p tax rate, has done something vaguely
This is why by the time that your humble correspondent gets to his office this morning, it is highly likely that the Chancellor will have personally couriered me a large tub of this...
In fact, at over 50% income tax, maybe I won’t bother setting my alarm clock for its usual five thirty tomorrow morning – maybe I’ll just have a few more hours in bed...maybe this weekend I will start seriously planning as to how the hell I am going to get Family Free Market off this sinking ship as quickly as possible
Mr Darling, the Chancellor, has delivered a Budget that makes it clear he wants those on higher incomes - be it wages or savings - to stump up.
You can forget stumping up more cash, its time to draw stumps...
He says that since the autumn we have put the banks on a firmer footing ‘cleaning up their balance sheet.’ What about cleaning up his own?
He says Government borrowing in the coming financial year will be £175 billion - amounting to 11.9% per cent of GDP. No country in the world has a bigger deficit. It's a staggering indictment of a financially incontinent Government living beyond it means.Next year he estimates borrowing at £173 billion. That's a chronic debt burden being piled onto our children at the most irresponsible rate. The man who is telling the rest of us to save more is borrowing like a drunken sailor.
The sums dwarf any supposed ‘efficiency savings’ to reduce spending by £10 billion and certainly dwarf anything that might be raised by the 50 per cent tax on those earning over £150,000, instead of the 45 per cent planned. This is a naked political gimmick which the Institute for Fiscal Studies doubts will raise a bean. Still it should cheer us up that he is socking it to the rich and driving them out of the country.
& when you add to that, taxes on fuel, booze & smokos have all gone up heaping further misery upon the taxpayer, what is exactly the point point pf sticking around here?
April 22, 2009
April 20, 2009
Like I really care
It is a measure of the shear arrogance of the Westminster Village that they continue to think that we give a stuff about whether Labour Lackeys were going to make unsubstantiated claims about Tories Tossers on some spurious website...
The row over Labour smears has been "resolved" and ministers must focus on other issues, Lord Mandelson has said. Reports that the Labour Party's general secretary met the men caught up in the smear campaign row to discuss online strategy was "tittle-tattle", he said. Ray Collins met Damian McBride and Derek Draper a month before the e-mails - smearing leading Conservatives - were sent, the News of the World reported.
...as The Englishman so correctly points out, the cheapest & quickest way to bring an end to this & so many of our so-called ‘issues’ is to buy more lamp posts. I for one look forward to the day when my correspondent from the other side of The Vale points his tractor & fully laden trailer eastwards along the M4 motorway. I will be right behind him in Larry Land Rover, loaded to the gills with firearms, ammunition & improvised explosives – even the most cursory glance at the newspapers must cause the rational to ask “Why shouldn’t regime change being at home?” The irrational such as me simply want to string 'em all up - its the only language this pondlife will understand
April 15, 2009
The Obama's dog arrives...
... & the whole world rejoices
Princes & potentates are queuing up to congratulate the new President on his stunningly astute canine selection. Meanwhile those of us who are not utterly enraptured at the First Dogs arrival are heartened by Michelle’s bold choices of dress designer & how her insights into organic farming will expedite global economic recovery
April 14, 2009
Berlusconi & the Final Fiscal Solution
Reported in the Brussels Diary column of Prospect
It has taken a global crisis, but the ideas of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s millionaire premier, are finally starting to sound almost sensible. At a summit of Europe’s biggest economies in Berlin in February, Berlusconi contributed little until pressed by Merkel.
Put on the spot, Berlusconi said that he was far from an expert but that the solution seemed simple: nationalise all the banks. Though there was a sharp intake of breath, the Italian prime minister for once sounded bold, radical & possibly ahead of the curve.
Inevitably it was too good to last. According to account, at the leaders’ dinner later, Berlusconi repeated the idea, this time adding that the tactic has worked for Mussolini.
April 7, 2009
& of Turkish membership of the EU
... Mr Obama also said Washington supported Turkey's efforts to join the EU. ...
May I humbly refer the President to the wise words of Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr
March 29, 2009
March 27, 2009
White riot - I wanna riot, white riot - a riot of my own
So if the creek down rise & the damn don’t burst, the 1st of April could see an almighty punch up in London
Police are describing the threat to London from G20 protesters as "unprecedented", with seven different protests expected in the capital on the day of next week's summit.
& already the dope smoking roman sandal wearing malcontents are trying to cut up rough
An organiser of G20 protests has been suspended from his job as a university professor after he warned bankers could be "hanging from lampposts". Chris Knight, professor of anthropology at the University of East London, is organising protests under the banner G20 Meltdown. He told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: "We are going to be hanging a lot of people like Fred the Shred from lampposts on April Fool's Day and I can only say let's hope they are just effigies."
Pardon me while I don't poo myself ! However, it is in fact a national disgrace that we seem to be unable to put on a half recent riot anymore, something that even the French can manage at short notice & with aplomb. Now of course your humble correspondent will be going along – just for the violence & to give the Old Bill a bit of a hand.
Never has All Fools Day been more aptly named & all I ask for to make my shabby life whole is the opportunity to beat some climate change protestors brains out while he is in the process of striking a blow against globalisation by nicking the till from MacDonalds
March 24, 2009
Just a quick round up of the UK political scene
Tony McNulty, the Employment Minister, is facing an official inquiry after claiming more than £60,000 in Parliamentary expenses for the home where his parents live.
&
Senior Labour MP Nigel Griffiths faces a Parliamentary sleaze inquiry after admitting that he cheated on his wife by having a sexual liaison with another woman in his House of Commons office.
Need I say more ?
March 19, 2009
Forget the global financial crisis, this is what really matters
Amateur fishermen and women may have to declare any catches at sea so they can count against the UK's fish quotas, the European Commission has said
Time to go back to dealing with the Europeans the old way...
March 17, 2009
Inspired
She has never been one to shy away from controversy. So when Heather Mills decided to buy a popular fish restaurant near her home, her first move was obvious: take fish off the menu. Miss Mills plans to turn the seaside eaterie into a vegan restaurant, believed to be the first in a planned worldwide chain.
Whilst my first reaction on reading this was “twat!”, on not quite sober reflection, this is an excellent idea & I wish Miss Mills all the very best in establishing a global chain of vegan restaurants … that way when the time comes to settle the score, the emaciated ones will all be in one place. Rounding them all up will be much easier & hence their recycling as human landfill, much quicker.
March 16, 2009
& you wonder why we will build barricades
The implications of the Government’s latest Big Brother E-Boarders scheme are simply horrendous…
Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade. Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called "booze crusiers" who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.
In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country - or face the possibility of criminal prosecution. The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.
Even swimmers attempting to cross the Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the provision of travellers' personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.
The full extent of the impact of the government's "e-borders" scheme emerged amid warnings that passengers face increased congestion as air, rail and ferry companies introduce some of the changes over the Easter holidays.
& how long before these details are sold to some doggy contractor in exactly the same way that the DVLA sells information about car ownership? Maybe another concenious civil servant will leave this data on a train. But we have nothing to fear cheap suit wearing mininsters & their acolytes asure us
A UK Border Agency spokesman defended the e-borders scheme. "It allows us to secure the UK's Borders by screening people as they travel in and out of the UK. The e-Borders scheme has already screened over 82m passengers travelling to Britain, leading to more than 2,900 arrests, for crimes including murder, drug dealing and sex offences. e-borders helps the police catch criminals attempt to escape justice.
Well here’s my concept justice – having hanged anyone that has anything to do with these proposals, we start burning down government buildings
“But,” splutters government when we jib at this, “it's for your own good! We're protecting you!” The same tone of hurt ministerial outrage will be heard more and more as people come to realise exactly what is involved in the vast new “e-borders” system, currently being set up to track everybody's international travel just because a tiny minority are up to no good.
& remember the next time that you are refused exit from the country because you have used up your "carbon allowance" for the year that it is all for the common good
& on the US economy
From reader MK
Think destroying the mighty economy of the United States is too big a job for you? Relax. Anyone can do it. A friend sent me a handy-dandy no-fuss 12-step program for wrecking financial havoc among even the world’s most advanced economies. I adapted it below for your edification. Your congressmen probably already have a copy. The White House certainly does. But you might want to print it out in case some opportunity for spreading unhappiness comes your way:
1. Since investors and the market in general hate uncertainty, have a vast array of conflicting ad hoc policy decisions so as to create uncertainty everywhere.
2. Transfer money from those who create sustainable jobs to those who create unsustainable jobs, e.g., the government
3. Promise to invest money in things that will enhance the country’s infrastructure, such as roads and internet access, but then practice bait and switch on a breathtaking scale, so the effort is swamped with pork for pet projects dear to Democrats
4. A sufficiently generous larding of pork can help ensure the destruction of bi-partisanship, so squandering the initial goodwill is definitely a very good move. After all, it’s hard to get things done when you’ve alienated people whose help you need.
5. Undermine the ability of those who create jobs by increasing their taxes so there’s less money available for investment.
6. While you’re at it, offer to spread the income around by raising taxes, in the process, making it clear to those who work hard, invest in their educations, take risks, save, and delay gratification that they will see their money go to those who do not do these things.
7. Encourage class warfare. Divide the populace and destroy cooperation, thus encouraging backlash and creating paralyzing polarization.
8. Talk up protectionism, since the beggar-thy-neighbor approach has such a long and vigorous history of encouraging depression.
9. Scare people with talk of economic catastrophe. You can backpedal later, but the initial good work of helping people lose confidence should have a lasting impact.
10. Print money on a scale that will insure inflation in the future. Print it on a scale that will make people not want to hold U.S. debt without staggering interest on that debt, if they’re willing to hold U.S. government debt at all.
11. Instead of allowing hopeless institutions to go bankrupt, pour vast amounts of money into them, prolonging the pain and running up the cost while only delaying the inevitable.
12. Burden future generations with unprecedented amounts of debt so that the economy you ruined today stays ruined tomorrow.
My friend stresses that this list is not exhaustive. Ask your elected representatives for further tips. Or write to the White House: they have loads of ideas for making things worse. But be patient. Ruining the greatest economy the world is not something you can do overnight. But it’s amazing, isn’t it, how much progress the President has made in less than two months? Five days before the election, he told his followers that they were that many days away “from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Poor things. They thought he intended to make America stronger. Fat chance.
March 13, 2009
I fought the law & the law ...
Clashes broke out between police and protesters in Pakistan yesterday as authorities extended their clampdown on demonstrators seeking to march to the capital.
In a move that highlighted the government's determination to prevent thousands of lawyers and political opponents from gathering in Islamabad, police in Karachi detained a number of senior figures. Having initially allowed several hundred lawyers to begin their march from the centre of the city, they then prevented them from entering the main highway.
Of course we have seen this all before & the only question in my mind when we see Pakistani riot police beating lawyers in the streets is what can we learn from others cultures?
I can't for the life of me remember who coined the phrase with regard to this topic but whoever it was, they are truely bless'd
Another great Nu Labour idea
Bankers and other people who have lost their jobs in the recession will be able to qualify as British teachers in just six months and the best people fast-tracked to head schools under government plans announced on Tuesday ... Schools Minister Jim Knight said the plans were designed to attract "more outstanding people" to the profession, allowing them to achieve Qualified Teacher Status in the half the current one-year time period
March 12, 2009
More Euro nonsense
So while we are all having to work even longer hours in a vainglorious attempt to get the economy moving again, when we collectively keel over, our NHS, which is “the envy of the World” won’t have anyone to treat us…
The key pledge of Labour's NHS reform has been to reduce waiting lists and now the majority of patients are treated within the target of 18 weeks from seeing their GP. However this will be reversed as junior doctors will be limited to working a 48-hour week, from their current 56 hours, it is claimed.
The extension of the European Working Time Directive will effectively result in the loss of thousands of doctor shifts, John Black, President of the Royal College of Surgeons said. And the Government fears there will be a lack of locum doctors available to step in and help fill the gaps, following changes in doctors' recruitment. It means patients will have to wait months for routine operations as surgeons prioritise emergencies rather than scheduled cases.
Let the carpet bombing recommence. Look at the period since 1945 as a lull, while we plugged in some new target co-ordinates (as well as now dusting down some of the old ones)
March 9, 2009
& Paddy is back to his old tricks
I am sure that it was only the Westminster Village that really thought that Gerry Adams et al had miraculously transformed themselves into born again lo calorie cuddly republican politicians - anyone with a sense of history will know that the Irish dig ditches, drink to excess & perpetrate murderous grudges. It’s what they do. It’s in the blood. However my little Tony & the rest of his Nu Labour cronies all knew better – if we released all the terrorists & allowed murderers to go onto the public payroll, everything was going to be better. Nangers!
The real Ponzi scheme
Regulators were stunned on Wednesday night by Gordon Brownoff’s admission that he had for a decade been running a giant Ponzi scheme. Across the UK, investors were seduced by his pledge of never-ending returns & his promise that there would be no return to boom & bust. Some say there were red flags that were obvious to anyone who took the trouble to look. They point to his claim to have abolished the business cycle & the constant flow of cash into public sector salaries – all of it funded by debt & promises of ever greater tax returns
For years he was giving money to one group by taking it from another. Nurses were paid by money raised from utilities; utilities were paid by cuts in corporation tax; women were paid by money raised from men & men paid by money raised on women.
Teachers were financed by smokers & smokers by drivers. Even to the end Brownoff was seeking new victims. Last month he offered existing investors a £20bn payout – paid
through a complex VAT reduction mechanism. Delighted investors pocketed the cash & Brownoff’s opinion poll stock rose steadily.
But investigators say he never had the money for the payout & intended to get it back from those same investors over the next three years, trying to sell new Brownoff bonds to
credulous overseas buyers.
The secretive Brownoff for years resisted having his books audited independently, preferring instead to use a husband-and-wife firm in Pontefract, Balls Cooper. Part of his success was he seemed so well-connected. “He even knew Peter Mandelson”, said one investor.
A fat capitalist cigar to Tricky for finding this one
March 6, 2009
History bites back?
As reader Mike points out - First this…
A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to [Former President] George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back
Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn't grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nations' flags for the TV cameras
Baldilocks has an interesting theory about the Washington Messiah’s behavior over the last few days…
If you recall, before Kenya became Kenya (1963) it was a British colony known as British East Africa. Between 1952 and 1960, there was this little “difference of opinion” between the UK and the natives of British East Africa—primarily from the Kikuyu tribe. That conflict is known as the Mau Mau Uprising. There were tens of thousands of African civilians killed and, according to Wiki, seven to ten thousand Africans interned by the British colonial masters. In Dreams from My Father, President Obama says that his grandfather was tortured by the British during the conflict, though he was not a Kikuyu but a Luo. Guess which prime minister ordered the Mau Mau insurgency to be put down.
Mystery solved. It seems that the president is seeking to humiliate the progeny of those who humiliated his ancestors. Revenge isn’t that complicated a motive. However, a question remains. Is this any way for a President of the United States to behave?
Your humble correspondent has a slightly take on recent events. Imagine this, you have have just finished moving into the house of your dreams when suddenly the one eyed Scottish idiot turns up – if it were me, I’d have shot the Brown one on the doorstep.
In any case, our treatment of the Mau Mau was very sound.
Brian down at the range, served in British East Africa during the Uprising. He’s an old man these days but still shoots very very straight.
A Labour MP telling the truth? Whatever next!
When Carolyn was in hospital, having just delivered us of wee Reggie, a very young girl in the bed opposite was also celebrating the arrival of her newborn. As was her proud father, who made great play to anyone who might have been listening (me) of how proud he was of his daughter. She was, I guess, about 16.
But proud? Proud that his teenage daughter was not only sexually active but was now a mother? Proud that any chance of a decent education, followed by a decent job, was now remote at best? Proud that she was, in all likelihood, about to embark on a lifetime of depending on benefit handouts for her and her child?
I’m a Labour MP, so some will undoubtedly be surprised, and shocked that I’m writing this. But I can no longer pretend that the army of teenage mothers living off the state is anything other than a national catastrophe.
Of course, despite this uncharacteristic honesty from the government benches, the Labour Party & indeed the wider Westminster Village is in complete denial about the only solution to the problems that these people cause – withdraw all social security payments immediately.
Why the hell should I have to pay for their lifestyle choices? Trust me when I say that I don’t care if these people end up destitute on the street. I ask no one to subsidise the way that I live my life & quite why the government thinks that I should want to contribute to these spongers is the reason that come the Glorious Day, the gallows will be busy disposing of our political overlords.
March 4, 2009
Phuque that!
For once even I am utterly speechless…
Veteran US senator Ted Kennedy, 77, is to be awarded an honorary knighthood. The Queen has agreed the honour for the brother of former US president John F Kennedy for services to the US-UK relationship and to Northern Ireland. Gordon Brown is to formally announce the award during his address to both houses of Congress on Wednesday.
When they say that Lord Ahmed is currently being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure they don’t mean that tea is overrunning at Buckingham Palace, so it should come as no surprise that that the one eyed idiot has decided to elevate a terrorist loving feinian drunkard. Pah & double pah!
March 3, 2009
& Brown goes to the US
On behalf of all stout bulldogs I would to apologise to all readers from the left hand side of the pond for that the one-eyed Scottish idiot being in your country. Fell free to take any measures you deem necessary, without limitation or recourse.
For the avoidance of any doubt, AJDS found this open letter to Mr Brown that neatly sums up the man...
The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP
10 Downing Street,
London
SW1A 2AA
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Prime Minister
An open letter demanding your resignation.
Your position is untenable and, I as a citizen of Great Briton demand your instant resignation.
You are unelected, have no popular mandate and lack the moral authority to be Prime Minister. Your terms as Chancellor and Prime Minister have been a total disaster for this nation and your attempt to cling on to power at all costs show a complete contempt for this nation and displays your absolute vanity and thirst for political power.
I list below some of the mistakes made by you during your time in public office. If as a director of a limited company you had made similar mistakes you would be subject to criminal prosecution and banned from being a company director. As a Government minister the standards exercised should be significantly higher than those exercised by a company director,
you have failed to maintain those standards and are unfit for public office.
Banking Supervision: You transferred responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority from the Bank of England so directly laying the seeds of the current banking crisis.
Banking Crisis: The initial response to the Northern Rock crisis was so slow as to be glacial and ultimately led to the damage done to the whole banking sector. A strong Prime Minister would have provided depositors with a guarantee that their deposits were safe and the bank run would have stopped. Ultimately the same guarantee would have ensured that the HBOS and RBS debacle would not have been so severe.
Criminal Negligence: The entire UK banking crisis has been caused by a lack of supervision under the regulatory regime set up by you, any man of honour would have resigned upon seeing the damage caused.
Vanity: You have used the banking crisis to attempt to advance your personal standing and political career at the expense of the nation.
Lack of Judgment: You have made three serious errors of judgmentin your appointment of advisers on the current financial crisis.
1. Your choice of banker to compile a report on ideas for improving public health was Sir Derek Wanless. a Northern Rock director when it imploded in 2007.
2. You appointed Sir James Crosby, the former HBOS CEO, to the boardof the FSA who then had to resign after becoming embroiled in therow over failings of risk management at HBOS.
3. It now also appears that Glen Moreno will be forced out of his job, as chairman of UK Financial Investments Ltd, the company set up to oversee the government’s stake in the bailed-out banks, because of his links with a Liechtenstein trust accused of tax evasion. You Fantasize: By clinging to the idea that, thanks to your genius British citizens are far better placed than competitors to handle this crisis. The following two facts demonstrate that this is a fantasy:-
1. The Office for National Statistics' revelation that while the number of foreign workers getting jobs in the UK continues to grow (up by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year), domestic unemployment is rising sharply.
2. According to Business Monitor International, a research company specialising in country risk, "Britain is facing an unprecedented fall in its economic world ranking… from 12th place in 2007 to 21st in 2010". "Despite enjoying 11 years of growth between 1997 and 2007, the UK ran a budget deficit of 1.7 per cent of GDP over this period, fuelling a fiscal time bomb. Faced with the financial burden of bailing out the banking sector and kick-starting the economy, the budget deficit will swell to an unsustainable 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2009."
Public spending: Your 2000 Spending Review presaged a major expansion of government spending, without any significant benefit to public services, directly leading to the UK being in the worst shape of any industrialised nation to weather the current financial crisis. You have colluded in hiding the full extent of public borrowing by using PFI initiatives to hide the borrowings off balance sheet. PFI is the most expensive and inefficient form of finance possible, and you have saddled the country with a debt that you cannot even quantify. Jeremy Pocklington, leader of the Treasury’s corporate and private finance team, could only give a rough estimate to Richard Bacon that the total liabilities, but not debt, from the vast majority of PFIs, but not all, from 2006-07 to 2032-33, but not beyond, is £157.9bn. That is not only astounding but unbelievable.
Public sector Employment: The office for national Statistics shows Public sector employment was 5,846,000 (20.4 per cent of all in employment) in June 2005, 680,000 (13.2 per cent) higher than in June 1998, whereas from 1998 to 2005 private sector employment only rose by 1,241,000 (5.7 per cent). This growth is unsustainable and wrong.
Growth: An OECD report shows UK economic growth averaged 2.7% between 1997 and 2006, lower than in any other English speaking country.
Gold sales: Between 1999 and 2002 you sold 60% of the UK's gold reserves at $275 an ounce, close to a 20-year low, a disastrous foray into international asset management.
Your spectrum auctions gathered £22.5 billion for the government which caused a severe recession in the telecoms development industry leading to the direct loss of 30,000 UK jobs. Two auctions were run in the USA, the first being cancelled and re-run (for less revenue) due to damage caused to the industry. The Americans realised their mistake and tried to rectify it. The British and German chancellors copied the North American first auction; which had failed. To copy a failed economic model is normally considered a serious error of judgement.
Your East Coast Mainline franchise auction led directly to the demise of GNER, an excellent company, which was replaced by National Express who offer East Coast mainline users a significantly poorer service. Your duty was not only to maximise revenues, you also had a duty to the shareholders, employees and customers which you completely failed.
Anti-poverty: The Centre for Policy Studies found that the poorest fifth of households, which accounted for 6.8% of all taxes in 1996–7, accounted for 6.9% of all taxes paid in 2004-5. Meanwhile, their share of state benefit payouts dropped from 28.1% to 27.1% over the same
period.
Tax: According to the OECD UK taxation has increased from a 39.3% share of gross domestic product in 1997 to 42.4% in 2006, going to a higher level than Germany. This increase has mainly been attributed to active government policy, and not simply to the growing economy.
You pledged to not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax however in all but your final budget, you only increased the tax thresholds in line with inflation, rather than earnings, resulting in fiscal drag.
You abolished the 10% tax band so that you could reduce the basic rate from 22% to 20%, to make it look like you were decreasing taxes. However in fact it led to increased tax for 5 million people, and, left those earning under £18,000 as the biggest losers.
Pensions: Your changes in 1997 in the way corporation tax is collected, directly led to the taxation of dividends on stock investments held within pensions, thus lowering pension returns and contributing to the demise of most of the final salary pension funds in the UK.
This act alone has single handedly damaged the pension of every person with a pension in the UK but also saddled UK corporations with a an ever growing pension liability, so much so that many companies futures are imperilled by these debts.
Falsehoods: You used the Laura Spence Affair to beat up Oxford and Cambridge about their admissions procedures, Lord Jenkins, then Oxford Chancellor and himself a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, said "nearly every fact you used was false.
Inappropriate links: Given the finding that the government did not carry a proper public consultation on the use of nuclear power in its 2006 Energy Review, your brother Andrew’s is links to one of the main nuclear lobbyists, EDF Energy could be construed as inappropriate.
The father-in-law of your closest adviser Ed Balls, Tony Cooper (father of the Labour minister Yvette Cooper) has close links with the nuclear industry. Cooper was described as an "articulate, persuasive and well informed advocate of nuclear power over the last ten years" by the Nuclear Industry Association on his appointment as Chairman of the British Nuclear Industry Forum in June 2002.
Iraq War: You supported British involvement in the Iraq War against the wishes of the UK population and helped to justify that involvement by publishing false intelligence. This war has directly increased the odds of terrorist attacks on British subjects and the financial cost has had a significantly detrimental effect on the British economy.
Military Covenant: You have not adhered to the 'military covenant', leading to a significant decline in the moral of the armed forces due to poor housing, lack of equipment and adequate healthcare provisions. The lack of equipment has directly led to an increase in the loss of lives,
and serious injuries, compounded by a lack care following serious injury.
The 15% VAT Rate: introduced to counter the effects of recession demonstrated a total naivety and breathtaking stupidity. Far from digging the nation out of a hole, it has saddled the country with a huge unsustainable debt.
No one should benefit from failure: You have on numerous occasions stated that no one should benefit from failure, however your tenure as chancellor was universally recognised as a failure, but you were rewarded with the Premiership and had the gall to accept. There will be no more Boom & Bust: In your hubris you made a statement that was patently untrue, and counter to any economic theory. You either knew that statement to be untrue and lied or if you believed it then you clearly demonstrated your foolishness and proved that you were unfit for office.
The UK is in a better position than any other developed country: this again is completely untrue, we have more than double the debt per head of population than any other country in Europe.
Public Services: You have destroyed Public Services by a raft of inappropriate targets, which have led to resources being wasted by the attempts to meet those targets.
Surveillance society: You have presided over and led to the creation of a surveillance society in which any perceived wrongdoing is used as a pretext to pass oppressive laws. You and your predecessor have both single headedly succeeded in making the UK an unpleasant place to live
in.
These are but a small sample of your failings any of which make you unfit for public office and for which you should immediately resign. You sir are a fraud and I am forwarding this letter to as many people as I can, via the internet in an effort to shame you into accepting your failures.
Yours faithfully
Steven Katirai
I think that should just about cover it!
March 2, 2009
Fat chavs, fat cats & Hatty Harperson
Just like this morning’s Fat Chav feature (see posts passim), there is so much about the Fred the Shred fiasco to enjoy. Indeed the latest parsimonious outburst from that hatchet faced old harridan Harriet Harman tells you just about all that you need to know about Nu Labour
Harriet Harman has said former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief Sir Fred Goodwin should not "count on" keeping his full £650,000 a year pension.
The deputy Labour leader described the pension settlement - agreed by the RBS board - as "money for nothing". The sum was unacceptable in "the court of public opinion," she told the BBC, and the government "would step in".
So, the Government would seem to be conceding that rightly or wrongly, Sir Fred Goodwin has an enforceable contract that entitles him to a £650,000 a year pension. However as we all know, Labour & indeed politicians of whichever hue come to that, are always very keen on the law when it comes to taking away our rights, freedoms or processions, but when it goes the other way its suddenly forget the legal system & get ye down to the Court of Public Opinion, whatever that may be but I strongly suspect that it has something to do with the editorial column in the Daily Star which manages to opine on the most complex issues without recourse to a single three syllable word.
Just stopping to ponder for a moment, is this the same Court of Public Opinion that wants to lynch paedophiles & rid the country of the blight inflicted on it by the Mohammedans? I don't suppose that our Harriet is quite so keen on that Court of Public Opinion!
Heads you win, tails you change the law retrospectively – that’s Harman’s proposal – which should cone as no surprise because during the 1970s & 80s she was under MI5 surveillance as a suspected communist sympathiser & commies as we know love a bit of extra-judicial justice when it suits their ends. So it should come as no surprise when she comes out with lines like this
And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in.
More proof, as if we needed any, that the Labour Party doesn’t care in the slightest about what the laws that we have to obey say, if they don’t like it, they are going to “step in”. But just for a second, lets recall what Leo McKinstry, Harman’s former parliamentary aide said about her when he portrayed her as an ambitious hypocrite over her failed attempt to oust Brown. Apparently she
possessed of shallow competence and intelligence, she could barely run her office, far less the country
Indeed, it was her colleague, the late Gwyneth Dunwoody who described her as
one of those women who were of the opinion that they had a God-given right to be among the chosen
Me, I’m with Sir Fred on this one & I really don’t care about the rights or wrongs of the issue. He has a binding contract with RBS which he has every right to enforce. I hope he phuques over Harperson with exactly the same thoroughness with which he turned over his former shareholders at Royal Bank of Scotland. If however hideous Hatty is allowed to change the law retrospectively (a move that will incidentally end up with her in front of an institution that she loves dearly, the European Court of Human Rights) with just a little luck, she will get completely hung out to dry & it will keep her busy until The Glorious Day when we will hang her properly.
February 27, 2009
What financial controls?
Money grabbing, opportunistic, control freaks that reward failure … & I am not talking about the likes of Fred the Shred & his ilk
The City of London and other financial institutions should be supervised by a new pan-European risk watchdog, a European Commission report recommends. Its proposals, written by ex-Bank of France Governor Jacques de Larosiere, include an EU-wide scheme to oversee risks and give early warnings.
They never miss a trick or an opportunity to expand the size of the burgeoning EU State but because we a ruled by whimps
the UK government will wait to see the details before responding
as opposed to giving ex-Bank of France Governor, Jacques de Larosiere, who drafted this nonsense in the first place, a formal measured well thought through & structured response. Maybe something along the lines of this peut-être?
I am currently having a bonus dilemma have been granted a raft of share options yesterday
This just about sums it up...
Aside from that, reader Alan got this memo yesterday...
Dear Staff Member
Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown of economy in the country since last Christmas, Management has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 40 years of age on early retirement. This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early).
Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be eligible for the SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination). Persons who have been RAPED or SHAFTED will be reviewed under the SCREW scheme (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers)...
A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as Management deems appropriate. Persons who have been RAPED can only get AIDS (Additional Income for Dependants or Spouses).or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired Personnel Early Severance). Obviously persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any further by management.
Persons staying on will receive as much SHIT (Special High Intensity
Training) as possible. Management has always prided itself on the amount of SHIT it gives employees. Should you feel that you do not receive enough SHIT, please bring it to the attention of the supervisor. They have been trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.
Have a good day
Managing Director
The funny thing is that on Monday, I got a memo that wasn't a million miles away for that.
February 25, 2009
February 24, 2009
Industry's position on both sides of the Pond
Interesting how prophetic a comic strip can be sometimes. Calvin's explanation of his lemonade stand business perspective has a resonance today. It is worth pointing out that this cartoon strip was drawn fifteen years ago!
Reader Martin gets a seven trillion pound government bailout for finding this one
February 12, 2009
The Free Market is dead. Long live the Free Market
From the pen of Mr. PJ himself, in yesterdays FT
The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens’s “third way” and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, “Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?”
Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before it happened but 232 years before – probably a record for going short.
“A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant,” Smith said in The Wealth of Nations. “If it is lett [sic] to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Therefore Smith concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it is rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it”. [281]*
Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading” as he politely called it.
The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s 30 private banks survived. The reaction to the ensuing credit freeze from the Scottish overtraders sounds familiar, “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith said, “were in honour bound to supply the deficiency, and to provide them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.” [308]
The phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary,” Smith said, “overtrading becomes a general error.” [438] And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin”. [266]
The South Sea Bubble was the result of ruinous machinations by Britain’s lord treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was looking to fund the national debt. The Mississippi Scheme was started by the French regent Philippe duc d’Orléans when he gave control of the royal bank to the Scottish financier John Law, the Bernard Madoff of his day.
Law’s fellow Scots – who were more inclined to market freedoms than the English, let alone the French – had already heard Law’s plan for “establishing a bank ... which he seems to have imagined might issue paper to the amount of the whole value of all the lands in the country”. The parliament of Scotland, Smith noted, “did not think proper to adopt it”. [317]
One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a speculative disaster – whether it involves ocean commerce, land in Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited expansion of credit.
Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith called “the Daedalian wings of paper money”. [321] To produce enough of this paper requires either a government or something the size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As Smith pointed out: “The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments.” [570]
The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free – free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith’s principle of “self-interest”), free in choice of employment (Smith’s principle of “division of labour”), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith’s principle of “free trade”). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence,” Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), “but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”
How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.
We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith said: “To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.” [440]
We could send in the experts to manage our bail-out. But Smith said: “I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good.” [456]
And we could nationalise our economies. But Smith said: “The state cannot be very great of which the sovereign has leisure to carry on the trade of a wine merchant or apothecary”. [818] Or chairman of General Motors.
* Bracketed numbers in the text refer to pages in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, Oxford University Press, 1976
February 11, 2009
Obey the suits
Goodness knows that I have done some stupid things when drunk or at least that was the excuse I gave to the awfully nice magistrate who thankfully recognised my old school tie & dismissed all charges. Rather like Jacques the Famous French Aviator, when I go down I want to go down in flames & not for protesting against Asil Nadir being allowed to flee the country by trying to ram a rather large British Telecom compressor trailer through the main entrance of the Polly Peck group headquarters it a fit of post-port patriotic indignation. Then there was the time that I bought some land in New Mexico on eBay after a proper gentleman’s luncheon but that’s a story for another day bottle of Glenlivet.
Now while we are on the subject of decent lunches, in the second half of 2008 Gordon Brown, after what I can only assume was a lunch that had morphed into a Gary Player*, had the monetary equivalent of a complete rectal prolapse & reconverted from a post-socialist free marketeer back to an old school state interventionist … & boy-oh-boy those nice City chaps didn’t so much as leg him over as give Broooone a full on fiscal reach around
Having basically bankrupted themselves, spunking away trillions of pounds worth of shareholder value in the process, they then blag the Scottish Git into buying the rotting carcasses of their once proud financial institutions (cushty!) before invoking the Student Paradigm - I now need even more of your money, to provide me with liquidity.
So why shouldn’t they pay themselves huge bonuses after all, in a normal market equity raising costs you +/- 5% in fees & the chaps must be due some huge fees having errrrrrr ‘raised’ so much fresh equity. Of course the Westminster village is incandescent because hell hath no fury like a politician scorned but if you are going to extort money, don’t kidnap some poor sod’s wife & kids just so you demand a measly twenty five grand for their release: hold the government to ransom & demand billions. It’s amazing what wearing an immaculately cut suit can do for you & before you know it, we will be back to business as usual.
* Gary Player – (rhyming slang) all dayer i.e. a lunch that lasts until well after dinner should have finished & you end up off your Chevy Chase
February 7, 2009
Thought for the day
Conservatives tend to respond to several moral senses while liberals focus on just two - harm & fairness - in which they have become particularly discerning
Jonathan Haidt
February 4, 2009
Special Relationships
If you have glanced at this mornings On This Day entry, you will see that it is the anniversary, in 1783, of Great Britain’s formal cessation of hostilities with its American colonies. As if by coincidence, I suspect that a lot of you saw pictures like this on last night’s news…
…shortly before you saw your supper for the second time. Notwithstanding the bout of projectile vomiting brought on by the mere sight of Miliband & Clinton, this morning we return to the special relationship between Britannia & Uncle Sam.
Back in 2003, Boy aged 6 at the time was playing with one of his chums. Little chum was & still is a good kid, notwithstanding his parents misguided liberalism. During the afternoon, my little beacon of transatlantic solidarity was overheard saying,
No, America is our friend because they helped us in the War
Of course, that flies in the face of the truth that most of Europe despises America for many many reasons. Any form of historic analysis reveals that half of Continental Europe could only get itself liberated with vast amounts of US aid; the other half got its collective arses kicked in the process but after that process was over, was able to be rebuilt with American taxpayers dollars, under the Marshall Plan.
From the stout bulldogs perspective, just remember that we won the Battle of Britain our own, & despite what Hollywood might think, we also didn’t need a lot of help to from the left hand side of the pond to crack the German Enigma codes. However looking at the whole of World War II, 25% of our ammunition & 50% of our tanks were supplied by the United States.
In addition, almost all our replacement merchant shipping & nearly all of our transport aircraft came with Made in America on the label.
In the normal course of events, the cries of yank-lover are drowned out by the sound of gunfire coming from FM Towers but I make no bones about being a pro-US & this being a pro-US blog. As regular readers will know, I'm no expert in so many things & geo-politics is one of those, so at this point I shall defer to Sir Winston Churchill & his 1943 broadcast from Washington
The experience of a long life & the promptings of my blood have wrought in me the conviction that there is nothing more important for the future of the world than the fraternal association of our two peoples in righteous work both in war & peace.
Of course the Euro-weenies continue to drone on that America is populated by narrow-minded cowboys that have no comprehension of the World stage, pursues a damaging unilateral foreign policy, think of Disneyland as a cultural peak & only want to eat in Taco Bell. It is the view of your humble correspondent however, that European non-intervention causes more problems that it solves; take for example Bosnia. The exception to this is of course, Germany - they have a nasty habit of invading everybody in an attempt to force entire populations to listen to 3-day Wagnerian operas. Best that the boxheads stay at home for the next couple of hundred years.
However, the Continentals dislike of America is deep seated & to a greater extent, has blinded EU leaders to recent World events. Most of Europe is at best spinelessly ambivalent to the War on Terrorism; France & Germany actively collaborating in their opposition (nothing new about the French collaborating with the Germans eh readers?).
But this loathing goes much deeper and steams from envy - Europeans hate America basically because it is so much richer & has higher standards of living. Forget the current economic woes, America’s socio-economic model will ensure that given time, they will pull through because basically American working folks produce more of just about everything in any year than their European counterparts. My concern comes from a slightly different direction & let us once again revert to the wise words of our skipper, Sir Winston, in his address to the House of Commons on 1 March 1955
We must also never allow the growing sense of unity and brotherhood between the United Kingdom & the United States & throughout the English-speaking world to be injured or retarded
This most special relationship is now being managed by that ghastly Clinton woman & the uber-numpty David Boy Miliband.
Doh!
What question? (Reposted)
The government has unveiled plans for "memory clinics"
Will these memory clinics also help politicians remember their manifesto pledges?
January 29, 2009
An apology & a rather large graphic
Actually, it’s more of an apology for posting such a large picture, but could I just point out that the scale of the investment banks losses can’t really be comprehended on a 150 x 150 jpeg
Nice work lads …that’s what I call delivering shareholder value!
January 28, 2009
Your Wednesday morning starter for 10: Alistair Darling …
…do you trust him to revive your flagging fortunes & the once Great British economy to boot?
Because thats the bottom line here. Regular readers know that your humble correspondent wouldn’t trust one of ‘em to even sit the right way round on the lavatory seat.
Bottom line. Gettttit?
January 27, 2009
Marx Brothers: what a good name for a publicly owned investment bank
From Reader Rufus
Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism - Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
Go though this might sound good, Mr. Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was possibly unlikely to use a word like technolgy in say 1867. So a couple of minutes of Google reveals that the full quotation comes from here & is…
In the wake of the cataclysmic failure of free market capitalism and the nationalization of the country’s banks, Americans over the age of seven will be forced to complete a reeducation program designed to re-instill lessons learned in preschool that have been deemed essential to functioning in a communist society by the federal government… citing Karl Marx, who presaged: "The owners of capital will stimulate the need of the working class to take expensive, collateral loans to buy their condos, houses and technological products; and, at the end, these unpaid debts will result in the nationalization of the banks upon their bankruptcy, and so the state will be on the pathway to communism"
Still a good quotation though !
January 26, 2009
Back to banking
This morning dear readers we return to the current turmoil in the global economy but before we get going, I would like to make one thing clear: despite some speculation over the course of last year, your humble correspondent works for neither an i-bank nor a hedge fund. Lets just say that whilst I know a thing to two about the capital markets, my current social pariah status is entirely of my own marking – I didn’t need somebody else’s failed balance sheet to achieve it. So to mark the stock market losses that we are all so enjoying (go on, have that cigarette, that way you don’t have to worry about your underfunded pension scheme) this morning we take that most vilified of professions as our topic – yes, its back to banking.
On Tuesday night, I had the pleasure of flying from Hong Kong to London first class. So, drunk & recumbent on my bed I was flicking through the movie selection while waiting for the stewardess to bring my next little drinkypoos when I noticed that they were showing Fight Club.
As you would expect, I don’t subscribe to Brad worship but it is interesting to draw parallels between some of the themes in that particular film (nilistic anti-establishmentarianism) & the increasingly virulent attacks that are currently being mounted upon the benfits of free markets & free trade from the op-ed pages of the liberal-left media.
However, rather than debate this particular topic with learned dicourse, forgive me dear readers if we go interllectual absailing & I reduce the topic to my own twardy level. As opposed to elegant & well constructed arugment I would like to set a little scenario for you all…
Imagine if you will that you are one of the former masters of the universe, an investment banker -against both your better judgement & repeated pleading the meme sahib has dragged to screaming like a five year old to a dinner party hosted by Mr & Mrs Progressive. Whilst this very action in itself is grounds for immediate divorce, you think of the children, throw both caution & common sense to the wind quicker that a socialist politican casts fiscal responsibilty to the dustbin & actually show up. Through gritted teeth the pleasentaries as dispensed with & with growing dismay as you sit down to dinner, you are greeted by a scene of such diabolical invention that the Devil himself would have been pleased with his handiwork: an entire table of Guardian types who look really of embark upon a 6 hour Obama-is-the-new-Massiah-athon.
The correct course of action in this sort of circumstance is as quickly as possible slaughter the hosts & other guests before finishing off all the booze because it would be churlish not to empty your now straining bladder over the still bleeding corpses ... before politely making your excuses & leaving.
However, I can guarantee you that you didn't kill everyone in the room you would have to endure that Great British tradition of the blame game that is currently gripping the UK in the same way the chlamydia grips a university campus.
City Minister Lord Myners attacks bankers for greed and arrogance
& of course, the “creatives” are getting in on the act as well
The author of best-selling novels including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, saying that the country's wealthy should be "strung up". In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, broadcast this morning, Sillitoe appeared to take a swipe at the greed of rich bankers and City workers, some of whom have been blamed for fuelling the current economic crisis.
It is the most unpleasent side of our national characteristic: envy. Market conditions are such that every class warrior, crypto-communist is getting in on the act. The current financial crisis is apparently all the fault of the big banks & has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the pofligate fiscial policies of those who have lorded it over us since 1997.
As for me, it is of course worth remembering that Andy Warhol once said that “Art is what you can get away with” - so until the next time dear readers...
January 24, 2009
The Scottish Legacy
From todays Torygraph, Simon Heffer...
As Scots the world over prepare to celebrate tomorrow their third best poet (after Henrysoun and Dunbar, of course) by eating sheep's intestines filled with what always seems to be gravel, it is appropriate that there should be stunning new evidence of the vast contribution their little nation continues to make to Britain. As recession is declared official, the pound sinks, the stock market totters, banks wobble and misery abounds, let's salute the Scotsmen who did it.
Some of my best friends are Scots, and one proposed The Immortal Memory at a Burns' supper this week. He told a very good joke. It was that God, having blessed Scotland with magnificent scenery, beautiful women, Glenmorangie and (let us not forget) Ayrshire's answer to Milton or Dante, made Scots fear what terrible blight they would suffer to balance all these great gifts. God replied "just wait until you see the neighbours". Sadly, it is worse than that. He also removed the brains, and any sense of moral responsibility, from almost every Scot who now chooses to enter public life.
There have been some great Scottish prime ministers – I think of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman not least – but Gordon Brown is not one of them. Nor, as we now know, was he a great chancellor. There have been some great Scottish economic thinkers, most notably Adam Smith, for whose works Mr Brown writes prefaces, proving only that if he has read the contents of what follows, he has certainly not understood them.
Now, accompanied by two of his compatriots – Alistair Darling, the ventriloquist's dummy who succeeded him at the Treasury, and Fred "the shred" Goodwin – Mr Brown has brought the British economy closer to its knees than anyone since Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald was a Scot too, but practised politics in an age when Scots in public life knew how to behave. Shamed by the pitiful response of the Labour government over which he presided to the crash of 1929-31, MacDonald executed a U-turn, cut spending massively and formed a National Government.
Mr Brown has no such self-awareness: nor do his dummy, nor Fred the Shred. The first two cling on to power; the third, humiliated, has been fired. He, however, is cushioned by the many millions he made while running RBS into the ground, though any shares he has left in the company are now worth 12p compared with 442p when he took over. If I had lost money because of his idiocies – he has been branded "the World's Worst Banker", which is perhaps an understatement – I'd be exploring the means of suing him to the point where he was selling The Big Issue.
Some of my dear readers have observed – indeed, are observing with creeping ferocity – that the English have been the victims of a plot by Scots to destroy the auld enemy. I prefer to think it is a cock-up. The little berk who is the only Tory MP in Scotland (and therefore shadow Scottish secretary – it's lucky for him a sheep didn't get elected too), David Mundell, has demanded that English retailers be forced to accept Scottish banknotes. What a good idea: let's see if we can drive a few more small businesses out of existence. After all, the way RBS is going, its notes will soon be worth less than the paper they are printed on.
The sooner the bunch of Scots who govern us are booted into history the better. I don't say that the English would be any better, but at least we would be paying for our own mistakes rather than someone else's. Never has the case for English independence from the Scots been so overwhelming. Sadly, I suspect that in the present state of penury England will be saddled with them for another 302 years of high-end welfarism at least.
January 22, 2009
Hedge Funds
The following cartoon came from a Barclays Capital publication on hedge funds, published in 2003
& we never saw this coming?
Sterling:Dollar Rates
Sterling's slide has continued, with the pound touching US$1.3622, as concerns about the UK economy and the banking sector intensified.
Sterling fell to its weakest level against the dollar since September 1985, before rising to $1.4015 ... last summer the pound was trading at more than $2
Over the last week, I have sat through several briefings that predicted that the Sterling:Dollar exchange rate will go to 1:1 over this year. If this happens, it will of course be the fault of evil currency speculators shorting Sterling & have nothing to do with the market correctly valuing the disastrous impact of Gordon Brown’s failed economic policies
January 16, 2009
Proof that at least one government minister has been smoking “green shoots”
Business minister Baroness Vadera has denied she is out of touch after claiming she could see "a few green shoots" of economic recovery
Another candidate for the lamp post tango
I seem to recall that I have been saying this for some time...
Ex-trade minister Lord Digby Jones says he was "amazed" to discover how many civil servants "deserved the sack". He told a committee of MPs he thought the civil service could "frankly... be done with half as many" people.
& I am always happy to lend a hand
January 14, 2009
January 13, 2009
Why exactly am I having to pay for this?
Taxpayers are funding the repatriation of hundreds of homeless Eastern European immigrants who have been living on the streets. Hundreds of thousands of pounds is being spent annually on travel costs for the immigrants, mainly Polish, who have been unable to find work in Britain and have no access to benefits.
Now we all believe in the free movement of goods, services & labour but if these people came to the UK under their own steam, is it not unreasonable for the taxpayer to assume that they can also get home under their own steam – or maybe the Polish taxpayer might want to pay for the safe repatriation of their countrymen?The first rule of working abroad is always ensure that you have enough money in your pocket to get home if it all goes tits up.
Its not that I am without compassion for the plight of these people & the flip side of the argument is that the taxpayer is currently baling out everybody & everything. Therefore why shouldn’t we pay to bale out foreign nationals. After all, we have been doing the same in Africa for decades.
January 9, 2009
Government Debt - Part 3
So simply printing money didn’t work in Germany, Argentia but according to Tax & Waste Brown, it will work in once Great Britain - just like it worked so well in Zimbabwe where they now have such hyper-inflation that they ended up having to print One Hundred Billion Dollar notes.
At that point, exchange rates just about have no meaning but in terms of relative values (all currency is a store of value) what does One Hundred Billion Zimbabwean Dollars buy you?
& thats all. If Brown has his way, Sterling will soon be going in the same direction
January 8, 2009
Government Debt - Part 2
Having very briefly looked an US indebtedness last night, it is worth considering that proportionally, the UK is in an even worse position. This situation is further compounded because the Government that got us into this mess, is now having to borrow even more money. It does this by auctioning off government bonds which it will have to pay back at some point in the future. The problem is that we are now fast approaching the point where the global markets are at the point where there is no longer any appetite from potential investors for this paper. This is not a good place to be when the Government is planning to sell £146.6 billon of debt before the end of March
Britain may overwhelm bond investors with a record number of quarterly debt sales, risking the first failed auctions since 2002 as the economy sinks into the worst recession since World War II.
“I’m not predicting that we will have failed auctions, but I can’t rule that out,” Robert Stheeman, chief executive officer of the U.K. Debt Management Office, or DMO, said in an interview last month. “It’s a big amount of debt to be sold. We are in a very different world than we were six months or a year ago.”
& the latest numpty answer from Prime Mininster Gordon ‘Prudence’ Brown is to follow the economic model that worked so well in Germany during the 1920’s & in Agentina during the 1970’s …& literally print more money. Lots of it.
The Government may resort to printing extra money if interest rates keep falling. It is being considered as a desperate measure if base rates fall so far that they cease to work as an economic lever.
Base rates are set to plunge [today] to the lowest level since the Bank of England was founded in 1694, with another big cut of at least half a point to 1.5 per cent or even lower.
Chancellor Alistair Darling and Bank of England governor Mervyn King are considering whether to embark on a new policy of expanding the money supply
Thank you Nu Labour for your catastrophic mismanagement of the economy since 1997. I hope you all die very slowly. In pain.
Government Debt - Part 1
The USA's Outstanding Public Debt as at 07 Jan 2009 at 10:20:11 PM GMT, was
but here is a little thought for you all...
On this day, the 8th January 1835, the United States national debt was percisely zero.
The United States has had public debt since its inception. Debts incurred during the American War of Independence and under the Articles of Confederation led to the first yearly reported value of $75,463,476.52 on January 1, 1791. Over the following 45 years, the debt grew, briefly contracted to zero on January 8, 1835 under President Andrew Jackson but then quickly grew
A swift check of the US Treasury website gives a total debt number on the 6th of $10,638,425,746,293.80. That figure breaks down to:
Intragovernmental Holdings - $4,319,616,621,638.24
Debt Held by the Public - $6,318,809,124,655.56
I'm off to bed now, I wonder what the clock will be reading by the time I get up & have Part 2 of this post written
January 6, 2009
Willie Peter makes you a believer
We first touched upon White Phosphorus back in November 2005 when the Septics were doling out the good news to insurgents terrorists in Fulluja. Needless to say, at that time the MSM was getting a tad angsty about its use…
Of course, comments like this wont stop the finger pointing & salacious accusations from the al-Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.
Now as then, WP is coming in for a slating but this time from The Times
Israel is believed to be using controversial white phosphorus shells to screen its assault on the heavily populated Gaza Strip yesterday. The weapon, used by British and US forces in Iraq, can cause horrific burns but is not illegal if used as a smokescreen.
For those of you that have never played with White Phosphorus or WP, it is known in the trade a Willie Peter & it is said of it that Willie Peter makes you a believer. Ironic eh? Aside from that, it is ideal for making the most excellent smoke screens & if a few terrorists get crispy crittered in the process, so much the better.
Has there been collateral damage? Yes of course there has & civilian casualties are always regreable however the residents of the Sunset Strip are all culpable by allowing Hamas terrorists to fire hundreds if not thousands of rockets into Israel. It’s a joint & several liabilty thing: Germans & the Japanese understand.
From the beginning of [2008] until June 19, Israel was struck by 2,660 projectiles fired from Gaza. From June 19, when the ceasefire went into effect, to Nov. 4, the total was 65. From Nov. 5 to Dec. 10, 237 mortar shells and rockets have been fired from Gaza at towns in Southern Israel
That chap who runs the UN, Willie Wonka or whatever the hell his name is, keeps banging on about proportionality but I have not yet seen a table that properly shows the mathematical relationship between a Hamas terrorist’s rocket fired indiscriminately at Israeli civilians & an Izzie 1,000 lb laser guided bomb aimed back at said terrorists. Maybe Mr Wonka should confine himself to sorting out UN’s unpaid parking tickets until such time as he can come up with such a relationship.
January 5, 2009
January 4, 2009
December 31, 2008
A Wednesday morning thought
Does anyone out there remember My Little Tony - we finally go rid of the little swine...
& afterwards he showed up again, this time as the UN's Peace Envoy for the Middle East. That worked out well then!
December 30, 2008
from Gaza City to the City of London
So Homous or what ever the hell they are called decided to unilaterally declare an end to the ceasefire with the Zionists. Smart move. The next smart move ... deciding that they would rain their rockets on the heads of the occupiers so that they are consumed by the flames of Islam as so instructed by the Prophet (PBUH)
… & exactly what did you think was going to happen next you intellectual spastics? Let’s be honest here, the Red Sea pedestrians don’t have much of a track record when it comes to the turning the other cheek. So when Sayed & Ahmed, having gotten themselves well & truly ideologically pissed (in both senses of the word) start lobbing their Toy Town pyrotechnics into Israel – 150 since Saturday - how exactly did they think it was going to end:
Option A
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert & his government with the overwhelming support of its electorate agree to unilaterally dismantle every vestige of Israeli state & allow a new Caliphate to be established in Jerusalem as soon as possible but definitely before prayers on Friday; or
Option B
Now to say that there is anger on the streets of Gaza City & throughout the Islamic world is nothing when compared to the collective gnashing of teeth from North London ‘progressives’, loony left champagne socialists & the usual Mohammedan-rent-a-mob. Indeed Sami, Salam & the Hamas apologists have been creating a little ruckus on the streets of London
& that when blended with a fair amount of something dark n peaty got me to thinking late last night…
Despite the vainglorious assertions of the porridge wog Brown, we are plunging into a seemingly bottomless recession but now have a conservative Mayor of London who is allegedly committed to such unfashionable ideas such as cutting the cost of public services. Therefore, why not outsource the policing of these demonstrations to …wait for it … the Izzies & save the taxpayer some money?
After all, shall we just say that they probably have more experience in dealing with these sorts of situations than the Metropolitan Police are incapable of arresting even one of our perfidious MPs without getting into a right royal hand bagging.
Now before anyone starts sending me angry emails asserting that I have finally taken leave of what little remains of my alcohol ravaged senses, there is a precedent for this. Recall if you will the passage of the Olympic Torch through London – the government seemed to be quite content to allow the Chinese paramilitary police kick the cr*p out of those protesters: why then don’t we extend the same courtesy to the Israelis? I for one would be straight down to Kensington to buy tickets for the matinee performance!
December 29, 2008
How much?
I would like to think that this little bastion of capitalism’s readership enjoy better than average remuneration – not so much the fruits of others labours as proper recompense from a free market that accurately prices goods & services. Take for example reader Richard’s December salary cheque…
Sadly however & as the more observant among you will have noticed, Richard is paid in Zimbabwean Dollars.
Forget the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee’s inflation targets, as failed African dictators economic policies go, that’s real mans inflation. When I was sent this on 19th December, that cheque was worth a tad over US$23 - by now its worth a lot less against just about every major currency you care to mention except Sterling which is fast approaching parity with the Zim $ !
December 23, 2008
Daddy, what did you do during the credit crunch?
or Where Do Bailouts Come From?
Junior had been watching Mom and Dad sulk around the house for weeks, wondering what was going on. Mom still tucked him in at night, and Dad played stick ball with him on weekends. Yet both parents seemed distracted and detached.
Finally, he could stand it no longer.
“Mom, Dad, what’s wrong? You seem so depressed.”
“Well, son,” his father began. “Your mother and I have lost a lot of money in the stock market, like many other people who work hard and save to send their kids to college and provide for themselves in their retirement. We don’t like to burden you. I see now that we should have explained what was going on a long time ago. Sit down, Junior.”
“Thanks, dad. I get upset when I hear kids at school talk about their dads’ companies getting bailed out. What does that mean?”
“The government has been handing out money to banks, other financial institutions -- even the auto companies. It hasn’t done much to help middle-class folks like us, which isn’t fair.”
“Mrs. Adams talks about fairness a lot in school,” Junior said. “She says it’s not fair for some people to be very rich and others to be very poor, that the government should do something about it.”
“That’s right, son,” Dad said. “The rich should pay more in taxes to reduce the gap between rich and poor, something they call income inequality.”
“You mean, someone should punish them for being rich? That would be like Coach putting me on the bench after hitting that grand-slam home run in the bottom of the fifth in the Little League championships. Why would Coach Perkins want to do that?”
More of the same here
December 22, 2008
Like any of us really care
In the finest traditions of the season of goodwill to all men, the Met & the Tories have started to indulge in a spot of festive handbagging (as if any of us stout bulldogs really care) & this is how the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation was reporting it on Sunday night…
A row has erupted between the senior police officer investigating Home Office leaks and the Conservatives. Anti-terror chief Bob Quick said the Tories were trying to undermine his inquiry following a newspaper story that he said endangered his family. Mr Quick says he was forced to move his family after details of their home were published. The Conservatives denied having anything to do with the story
However what the Mail comes at the same story in a slightly different light, quoting the same said copper …
The Tory machinery and their press friends are mobilised against this investigation in a wholly corrupt way, and I feel very disappointed in the country I am living in
So now we have the police accusing the Conservative Party of corruption – fantastic. You just can't make this sort of thing up. However dear readers, you have to remember that since 1997 our police haven't become at all politicised but ZaNu Labour think that they might - well at least according to Home Secretary Jacqui "Jackboots" Smith…
Proposals for direct elections to police authorities have been scrapped after the Home Secretary caved in to growing concerns about the politicisation of the police.
Now while most of us feel that Jacqui Smith is only fit for human landfill, at least her husband thinks that she is doing a good job ...
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s husband has been unmasked as the author of a letter-writing campaign defending the Government to her local newspaper – without revealing that they are married. Richard Timney has had a series of angry letters published in the Redditch Advertiser in Worcestershire attacking the Tories over schools and backing Ms Smith’s controversial identity-cards plan
But he conveniently neglected to point out that his wife Mrs Smith, 46, MP for the marginal seat of Redditch and a former Schools Minister, was responsible for both policies. Nor did he say that he is paid £40,000 a year as her Commons adviser..
The more of this sort of nonsensical behaviour that I read & there are reams of it out there on a daily basis, the more that my policy of stretching the necks of anyone who has anything to do with the Westminster Village looks completely vindicated
There are many of us out there in the Shires whose earnest Christmas wish is to see the boughs festooned the still twitching corpses of these pondlife.
Now that is what I would call a properly decorated Christmas Tree
December 17, 2008
December 16, 2008
Flying footware
Aside from managing to sneak in a couple of hours trigger time on Saturday afternoon, it is fair to say that your humble corresondent devoted a lot of the weekend ducking current events in Albion in a somewhat similar manner to which GWB ended up dodging the Slippers of Jihad. Good lord, these insurgents have absolutely no sense of what is sartorial acceptable. If you are going to throw your shoes at the President of the United States, at least lob some Lobbs & not those sort of cheapo nasty shoes that are normally reserved for social workers & teachers.
Frankly wouldn’t No.10’s press conferences be a lot more watchable if our painfully liberal political correspondents started raining fairtrade espadrilles down on Brown, everytime that lying Scottish git opened his duplicitous mouth. In fact this entire concept could do more to revive the fortunes of manufacturing industry far more than hollow political gestures like cutting 2% off VAT. The sight of a proper Empire building hobnailed boot ricocheting off the bridge of the Prime Minister's nose would certainly cause an immediate revival of interest in the political process as the snot & claret started squirting over the front row of Nu Labour sycophants reporters.
Therefore dear readers, in the words of (former) PC Dave Copperfield, the first question we should ask ourselves this morning is what can we learn from other cultures?
Another victory for the taxpayer
A government efficiency drive designed to save £57m has left taxpayers with an £81m bill, a report by MPs has claimed
Forget the National Audit Office...there is only one course of action that makes any sense in instances like this
December 12, 2008
When ‘no’ is simply not an option
Hell hath no fury like a politician scorned & absolutely nothing, not even radical Islam hath fury like a Euro-politician scorned. This morning dear readers, please pity poor poor Ireland. A few months back, the Paddies had the temerity to tell Brussels to stuff their constitution treaty. Failed. Wrong answer. How predictable was it that they would be forced to sit the exam again.
I am not sure if Brown’s Britain is a metaphor for the European Union or the European Union is a metaphor for Brown’s Britain – which ever way round it is, the result is the same. Democracy is considered to be a good thing just so long as it produces the answer that the political elite want. If the prols don’t vote the way that is required of them they will keep being asked the same question until they come up with the answer that is required. All resistance is futile. Dissent will not be permitted.
Recall if you will dear readers that both the Dutch & the French rejected the EU Constitution in referenda – despite that, in both instances the respective governments went ahead & ratified the Lisbon Treaty against the wishes of their electorates. If that isn't the perfect example of European Democracy in action, try this for size ….
The Brussels executive's term of office ends on Oct 31 2009, but the Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, has said there were plans to extend his mandate until the end of the year.
Indeed the hypocrasy becomes more blatant on the daily basis. It is being reported that Gordon Brown thinks that the Irish should ratify the constitution … yet he wont keep his own party's election pledge to give us stout bulldogs a referendum on this issue.
For perpetrating such a massive electoral fraud & for that reason alone, I hope that the Jihadis sneak one through & the Palace of Westminster together with all of its occupants are consumed in a single apoclyptic confligration. It’s a far far better end than they deserve as well as being a lot quicker & less painful fate when compared to what I would do to every last one of these b*stards if I could get my hands on ‘em
December 11, 2008
Uppity huns
Goodness knows that I am no fan of our Government but when some bl**dy Boche starts to criticize our domestic policies (which incidentally is in the finest traditions of the EU) a robust rebuttal is required.
Downing Street has hit back at an outspoken attack by Germany's finance minister's on the government's plans to combat the economic downturn. Peer Steinbruck had criticised the UK's decision to cut VAT and raise the national debt to record levels. He said Britain's switch from financial prudence to heavy borrowing was both "crass" and "breathtaking".
The fact the Herr Minister is probably 100% correct has nothing to do with it. “Sources close to” are already leaking like a Panamanian bum boat but once again could I humbly point out that both our grandparents & parents knew much better exactly how to deal with meddling Teutons…
Of course, that Scottish git is way too important to get dragged into this one - he has much loftier matters to attend to...
Prime Minister Gordon Brown made himself the butt of merciless mockery in the House of Commons when a slip of the tongue led him to boast "we have saved the world".
Git!
December 10, 2008
They would rather we sat in the dark
Aside from being deeply depressing, economically the European Union is in a deep depression. Greece is being swept by riots & all across the continent, financial institutions are staring into the abyss of insolvency. Illegal immigration is rampent, wasteful spending is out of control while bloated & unsustainable social welfare programmes consume more of GDP. In the face of this what does the EU find time to worry itself with ...?
A European Union report has recommended banning conventional incandescent light bulbs by 2012 to save energy and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions
& to think that my old granddad spent 4 years bayoneting Huns in the mud at Wipers for it to come to this
December 9, 2008
5 before 9
1. The open display of tobacco in shops is to be banned in England, the government is expected to announce later
In effect, they want to ban the sale of tobacco from shops. This should come as no surprise given that Nu Labour seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to ban the sale of alcohol in pubs
2. A trial version of the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has been launched. Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world. Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room. Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal's creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims.
Excellent. Will women characters have to wear black sacks? Will there be a jihad function? Is there a Sharia Law preset? Can we have suicide bomber characters?
3. Women are more skilled than men at assembling flatpack furniture, according to a female boss at furniture store Ikea
Wonderful. Now you have an excuse for leaving it to the Mrs to build that sturdy new Ikea shelf unit
4. More than £2 billion a year is lost through tax evasion
Good
5. The alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks and four co-defendants last night confessed to murdering nearly 3,000 people in America's worst terrorist atrocity. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stunned a pre-trial hearing in Guantanamo Bay by declaring that he and his alleged accomplices plan to plead guilty. All five demanded an 'immediate' court session to announce their full confessions
More good news. Time to start oiling that rope. Looks like it will be needed sooner than expected.
December 8, 2008
Serves 'em all right
Predictably & in exactly the same way that you always find flies on a fresh cow pat, Labour lackies are trying to protect one of their own as the level of criticism of the Speaker of the House of Commons continues to rise…
Housing minister Margaret Beckett said it was a "long-standing tradition" that MPs did not criticise the Speaker's Office and she urged all members to refrain from this.
& now that smug little git Ed “Blame Everybody Else” Balls is also trying to get in on the act
Labour ministers have rallied round the Commons Speaker after 32 MPs told the BBC that they no longer had confidence in him after the Damian Green affair. Fifty MPs said Michael Martin was at fault over the Tory MP's arrest and his Commons office search in a leaks probe. Ninety MPs replied to the BBC research. Children's secretary Ed Balls said the criticism by Conservative MPs was "undermining" the Speaker.
Well it just strikes me that firstly, the more of the Westminster Village that get locked up the better – if I could prevail upon you to look at my previous post on how Parliament has both politicized & at the same time destroyed our once magnificent police service – any of the incumbents that get nicked – to hell with them. If a few more get tinned from their tax payer funded jobs in the process … so much the better
December 4, 2008
& they wonder why we loath them?
I was much taken by this piece that appeared in the Torygraph yesterday
the truth is that the deepest divide in British politics today is not between Labour and the Tories; or between Speaker Michael Martin and irate backbench MPs; or between members of Gordon Brown's Cabinet and each other. It is between Britain's whole political class and the great majority of the British people. On the far side of a chasm stand politicians of all parties and their hangers-on. On the near side is almost everyone else
This of course isn’t surprising given that since 1997, our political overlords feel that they can now act with complete impunity & the whole notion of political accountability seems to have been thrown out of the window. Anthony King who penned the article goes on to list just a few of the “failures” that we have all so enjoyed & had to pay for:
BSE debacle
Poll tax
Child Support Agency
Britain's ignominious expulsion from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism
Millennium Dome
Massive cost-overruns and the partial or total failure of IT projects across the public sector
Failure to control immigration
Bungled introduction of home information packs
Fiasco of the cost-ineffective Assets Recovery Agency
Collapse of Metronet
Cash for honours
GPs' and dentists' ill-drafted contracts
Northern Rock; the failure of government regulation across the financial sector
Botched marking of last summer's Sats exams
Mishandling of Post Office card accounts
In fact the list is practically endless & should include the shameful way in which Nu Labour has treated our magnificent Armed Forces as well as the erosion of our basic rights & freedoms. But please remember, we still have ID cards and the London Olympics to look forward to.
Over the last few days the arrest of some previously unknown Tory MP in what increasingly looks to be an arbitrary police action & the searches of his home & offices without a warrant is only the latest example of how Parliament & Parliament alone has sought to create a society that doesn’t give a damn about the rights of the individual. The fact that it is a member of the Westminster Village that is on the receiving end of some rough justice is the most delicious irony of all.
However, in response to the police’s extra-judicial actions & the appalling lack of judgment shown by the Speaker of the House Michael Martin, what is going to happen? The Speaker’s actions are to be investigated by an all party committee of MPs appointed by … wait for it … the Speak of the House. & they wonder why Joe Public has become disillusioned by politics. That nice Mr Fawkes was right all along
December 1, 2008
Bombay
As I type this through the usual haze of beer, red wine & whiskey somewhere over the North Atlantic, I can’t help but ponder the events in Bombay & contrast what would have happened if the same had occurred at my point of arrival this morning (London) or indeed Dallas, from whence I have come.
Firstly, why on earth are so many commentators so surprised that Islamo-fascism hasn’t gone away? It might be reeling from 7 years of near all out military assaults & the attention the most sophisticated intelligence agencies in the world have managed to curtail some of its nefarious activities, but back in Blighty the Government remains committed to completely ruinous two pronged strategy: uncontrolled immigration continues unabated & numerous agencies are unstinting in their efforts to appease the Mohammedans in a manner not seen since Marshal Petain launched his award winning “Nazis are nice” advertising campaign.
In fact, in once-Great Britain, the police seem more interested in covering up information that might embarrass their Nu-Labour pay masters rather than extending the Rule of Law to our home grown 5th Column. Now while we are on this point my only real regret at the fact that some obscure Tory MP got hauled down to the station was that it stopped there – if it were down to me & it is a crying shame that it isn’t, I would drag just about every member of the Palace of Westminster down to the cells for as long as it took to beat a confession out of them & thence on to the gallows
However, to get back on topic, governments are ever quick to protest that there is no defence against such an attack such as Bombay has just endured – they have already branded it a so-called “nightmare scenario” because if it occurred in say London, the already cowed population would be slaughtered in a similar fashion to the victims in Bombay. In terms of body count, our Government & police spokesmen are probably being honest for once because since the mid 1960’s, certainly in Britain, successive administrations have spared no effort in both disarming & emasculating us plebs. It’s fine for ministers to have Special Branch bodyguards & for our perfidious MPs to be ringed with armed guards – but as for the wider population? Phuque you Jack, we’re alright. The day the Martyrdom Express turns up we are on our own, believe you me. The immediate response of the police & the security services won’t be to protect us untermensche .
Contrast that with what might have occurred if say the camel jockeys had tried the same stunt in North Dallas where I have been residing for few days … two Allah Akbars & when the gun smoke finally cleared, Buddy would be comparing the size of the exit wounds made in the true believers by his 230 grain jacketed hollowpoints to those made by his wife’s 165 grain Hydra-Shoks. Problem over. Period. & still enough time to urinate on the bullet riddled corpses having taken ears as souvenirs before the cops show up.
The only upside to what has occurred in Bombay is that these tragic events may finally serve to expose the extent to which Islamic terrorism is funded & supported by the Pakistani military & state security apparatus. That might well have the knock on effect of causing the 37th war or however many it is now, between two countries that never need much of an excuse to kick off again. In that case, the fun mightn’t stop in the Kashmir this time given that both protagonists have now built Airfix nukes & are not noted for their sang-froid. What a twofer that would be for us stout bulldogs. Firstly Pakistan being nuked off the face of the earth would definitely cut levels of immigration (both legal & illegal) into the United Kingdom – i.e. a lower burden on the taxpayer. Secondly, India would fare a little better, but not much & that would mean that Simon from the call centre who so successfully irritated your humble correspondent to billy-o the other week by trying to sell me a mobile phone that I already have, would possibly not be afforded the opportunity to do so again. Result.
November 25, 2008
Farewell prudence
& so the markets have started to respond to Darlings 'stick it on the overdraft' rescue plan. Nu Labour are going to run up a vast debt mountain & everything will be alright again. Well not exactly. A swift look at the price of Credit Default Swaps tells a slightly different the story
A Credit Default Swap (or CDS) is an insurance policy against the government not being able to repay the money that it is currently borrowing with such gay abandon. The above graph shows how the cost of such a policy has rocketed since August.
For comparison, the chance of UK default (shown in yellow) is benchmarked against the chance of the Reichsbank being unable to meet its commitments. As the Financial Times commented
The City is shorting UK Plc
If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, consider this: have a look at the table on the right hand side of the slide - low numbers are good in this instance - & Belgium is now more creditworthy than poor Blighty !
November 24, 2008
Beware the Hun in the Sun
This from EU Referendum
An extraordinary article in The Daily Telegraph today announced that the EU is "to build network of spy satellites". The multi-billion-pound system is known as "Global Monitoring for Environment and Security" (GMES), on which the commission, with the European Space Agency, has already spent £154 million on preparatory work, and expects the whole project to cost £1.54 billion between 2006 and 2013
In more sensible times we knew exactly how to deal with this sort of thing...
November 21, 2008
No need to 'sign on'
This piece of classic advertising from the late 70's would be wide of the mark these days
In Brown's happy workers land, we no longer have dole queues because...
Figures from the Office for National Statistics for the three months to June 30 show private sector companies laid off 29,000 staff while over the same period an extra 13,000 civil servants were hired
Its good to see that despite the global financial turmoil, its business as usual in once-Great Britain’s burgeoning public sector
November 20, 2008
There’s nothing like a little fascism to bring out the hypocrisy on all sides
BNP members have told BBC News they have received threatening and abusive phone calls and e-mails after a leaked document was published online. The membership list includes police officers, who are banned from being in the BNP, teachers and soldiers. It includes names, addresses, telephone numbers and jobs of 12,000 people
& it would appear that Nasty Nick & his crypto-fascists are getting a little hot under the collar…
Mr Griffin said he had lodged a complaint with Dyfed-Powys Police on the grounds that the publication breached human rights and data protection laws. He told the BBC the party would use Human Rights Act to try to protect the identities of its members
… even though the BNP is vehemently opposed to European legislation & the Human Rights Act in particular. However this little piece of hypocrisy pales into insignificance when compared to the manner in which current UK legislation deals with the BNP. Currently the following groups have what used to be known as the right of free political expression curtailed:
Police & prison officers: Banned from being members of the BNP
Council & NHS employees: Not banned but would be disciplined if beliefs interfered with job
Doctors: Must not allow beliefs to compromise care or attempt to impose political views on patients
Nurses: Not forbidden but code of conduct requires commitment to equality & diversity
Teachers: Membership of political parties must not compromise professional conduct
Trades Union members: Under laws being passed this year BNP members could be expelled if judged to be in opposition to union's beliefs
Armed forces personnel: Not explicitly banned but personnel are barred from political activity or demonstration
The reason given for all this is that the British National Party is considered to be an organisation that promulgates racist policies. Take the Police’s stance for instance…
Police are banned from becoming members of the BNP because it would damage race relations, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers . ACPO's workforce development spokesman Peter Fahy said: "Membership or promotion of the BNP by any member of the police service, whether police officer or police staff, is prohibited. This is because such membership would be incompatible with our duty to promote equality under the Race Relations Amendment Act
Following this reasoning, it is therefore completely justified to discriminate against members of the BNP because it advocates discrimination. I have got that right haven’t I? I just love moments in my life when I stumble upon weapons grade irony like this.
However, just because its early on a Thursday morning lets take this reasoning & move it on a stage further. The same organizations that believe that they have right to discriminate against BNP members, under similar legislation, are also supposed to be implementing the Buggers Charter – employers are supposed discriminate against those who discriminate against shirt lifters. Therefore groups that should be discriminated against include the Mohammedans, Roman Catholics & Orthodox Jews
Oh lorks –o-lordy … just look what happens when the Westminster Village tries to mandate what we plebs can & cannot believe!
November 14, 2008
Margaret Beckett, Member of Parliament for Derby South & Minister of State for Housing and Planning.
Heard on Question Time last night...
One of the reasons that I went into politics was because I felt I didn't have the skills to be a social worker
That says it all really
November 12, 2008
The failure of conservatism
Spotted by Maggies Farm, PJ O’Rourke on the recent election…
There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has. "I've got six sons," the farmer says.
"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.
"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'…"
November 11, 2008
You just can't make this up
When it comes to shameless cockweasel amoral behaviour, you have to look no further than the Westminster Village to see more duplicity than at the average Greek counterfeiters convention. Even the most cursory glance at the antics of Parliament’s inmates will reveal more backstabbing than goes on in London’s pubs on an average evening. Its just a shame that just like Blighty’s pubgoers, more MPs don’t end up in the morgue
With the same recurring inevitability of an outbreak of herpes our political overlords are complaining squealing like stuck pigs that we are too cynical about their motives (as if) & at the top of the Nu Labour blame triangle are who? Bloggers! Surely not? We are all wholesome clean living paradigms of equanimity that will go to any ends to rescue drowning little kittens. However in the warped & twisted universe inhabited by the ginger haired old harridan…
Political blogs are fuelling a culture of cynicism about politics, communities secretary Hazel Blears has claimed
& there was me thinking that we were just kids in pajamas that no one read. Clearly we have become cynical kids in PJs, who according the sour faced one, are as guilty as sin when it comes to thoughtcrimes &
spreading corrosive cynicism
I certainly would never want to be accused of that....
The closest that I do to corrosive is the browny-black sludge that is currently running out of the dung heap in the corner of the farmyard & leaching into the aquifer. However trust me when I say that despite the odour & the fact that our local streams are now devoid of any form of life, it is in a good cause … as part of my attempt to create dark matter. As soon as I have managed to make say half a Landrover load, its going straight through the letterbox at the Palace of Westminster in the vainglorious hope that we might be rid of the lot of them in one fail swoop & start saving the taxpayer not insignificant sums of money.
However aside from our perceived cynicism, we also
fuel disengagement by focusing on unearthing scandals, conspiracies & perceived hypocrisy
which again is as wide of the mark as your average French artillery shell. The only fuelling that your humble correspondent would have to admit to in Court is the petrol-air weapon development programme that regular readers will know is going on at the back of the Dutch barn. Come The Glorious Day, forget the representatives of the Caliphate Party & their never ending list of perceived injustices, it is us stout bulldogs that will extract a terrible price from the Comrade Brown & acolytes. But aside from not being true believers in Nu Labour, it seems that we bloggers have
disdain for the political system and politicians
Now that also simply isn’t fair or right. I have neither disdain for our political system nor for politicians – I am however dismayed on a daily basis by the way in with the current regime has sort to erode our beloved freedoms while dismantling so many of the institutions that define once-Great Britain & have served her so well over the years.
Unless and until political blogging 'adds value' to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and pessimism
Adding value? What on earth is that supposed to mean in this context as it is normally only used by failing CEO’s trying to explain where all the shareholders funds have gone. In fact I much prefered cynicism & pessimism because I can promise your all now that I will be the most chipper fellow in the world when I am performing the happy dance on the last socialist control freaks grave.
Non- recourse spending
For the 14th year running, the EU’s auditors have refused to sign off its accounts i.e. the EU is unable, to its auditors satisfaction, to account for where all our money has gone.
If you don’t file a tax return to the Inland Revenues satisfaction … you go to jail. If you are a company director & you don’t file audited accounts with Companies House … you go to jail. The government sends billions of pounds to Brussels each year which it is unable to account for … you send billions of pounds the year after. After all, nothing beats frittering our money away.
I know that I get irate about this story every year, & my normal answer is to recommend option A default response - start hanging politicians. However this year we have a seismic change (in honour of The Chosen One) & should be offering the EU option B. Namely, no more money until you file 14 years audited accounts & you have 90 days to file said accounts or the bombing starts
I just feel quite strongly that when you take a look at the hydra headed EU bureaucracy hanging unaccountable politicians & unelected bureaucrats will simply take too long, even if it is carried out on an industrial scale - carpet bombing is the practical solution
November 10, 2008
Robert Mugabe declares USA elections null & void
Robert Mugabe, world-famous presidential person, upstanding Zimbabwean citizen & despotic murderer has declared the USA presidential elections a complete sham & not worthy of the publicity they have received. In a sharply worded statement pinned to the back of the USA Ambassador to Zimbabwe with an ice pick, he has accused the USA of being unfair and biased in their election process. He expressed amazement that the American public should only be allowed to vote for the media’s preferred candidate, however he did go on to comment that in terms of biased coverage, it was an example that he hoped the Zimbabwean press would follow
November 5, 2008
Portfolio Valuations
Long or Short Capital have been looking at how current investment trends are applied to Assets Under Management or as Mr Juggles terms it,
High-End Female Asset Analysis
High-end Hooker: Her position is strongest and her assets are acyclical. In good times, men are flush with cash and looking for strange but are also less dysfunctional; this leads to an allocation towards a basket mainly consisting of High-End Wives, with maybe a 15% position in High-end GFs and a 2-5% position in High-end Hookers. As markets worsen and/or crisises take hold, Man is increasingly dysfunctional and looking for ego offsets. It also in this time when Man typically contemplates or engages in life restructuring which can entail simple cost saves, like headcount reduction, or even full-on recapitalization, flushing out the junior capital. A successful market-timing Man will typically have a portfolio composed of 60% High-end Hookers, 30% High-end GFs and 10% value High-end Wives when the market is bottoming. As the cycle comes around, the High-end Hooker position is reduced opportunistically, some of the High-end GF portion transitions organically to High-end Wives and the value High-end Wife position is added to with more growth High-end Wives.
October 28, 2008
David John Evans: 23 April 1935 – 22 October 2008
This morning dear readers it is with sadness that I have to report the death of David Evans, the former Conservative MP for Welwyn Garden City & Hatfield. Now regulars will know that I have little time for nearly any politican you care to mention whatever their hue. However Evans was one of those deliciously rare exceptions & even the disgustingly lefy Gruiard had to conclude
Scarcely any Guardian or Independent article involving David Evans, former Tory MP … failed to mention his car-salesman's accent, a sound to chill the blood of any liberal
Now just how badly do you want an epitaph like that? As his obit in the Torygraph goes on to explain
To say that Evans was a man of strong views would be to understate the case. There was probably no one more contemptuous of the wiles of the spin doctor or of the whispered back-stabbing in the corridors of Westminster: a classic grass-roots Conservative, Evans said what he thought, in plain terms, without fear and damn the consequences.
"Do-gooding" liberals, teenage thugs, proselytising homosexuals, and those among the unemployed who showed no diligence in looking for work were among those who felt the lash of his tongue.
Lets just pause for a moment to let the wild cheering subside before going further. Decorum restored? OK lets continue…
He once remarked: "I am a Right-wing disciplinarian. I do not trust Russians. The more nuclear weapons the better." He supported the return of capital punishment, and declared that the way to deal with rapists was to castrate them.
On one occasion he derided the (female) Labour candidate in his constituency because she lived with a boyfriend and "three bastard children", and had never done a proper job. His thoughts on the environment were unequivocal: "I'm more concerned about litter in Parliament Square than the ozone layer."
I know I know. This man’s face should be on every banknote & there should be a national holiday established in his honour, but there is yet more…
he told the European Commission to "get stuffed", advocated the hanging of murderers, opposed abortion, and said of football hooligans, "Give'em scars for the rest of the lives". As the commentator Simon Heffer once observed, he was "famed for his view that the cat o' nine tails is the progressive answer to football hooligans."
Excuse me, I think I need to go & compose myself in a darkened room. But before Nursie gives me my medication, I will leave you with this parting thought; in the place of this staunch Thatcherite, who do we have these days? The answer is sadly, Dave & George. We as a nation are so completely & utterly doomed.
October 27, 2008
Monday morning lynching: Part 1
Is it just me, or does anyone one else see a similarity?
I know that it is too much to ask that Brown meets a similar end to Il Duce but we can all live in hope
October 26, 2008
& the truth finally comes out...
At last, The Englishman 'fesses up
"Add me to the ranks of the pathetic"
but so am I
October 21, 2008
Rope Required - Part 1
Aside from the whole tone of this article on the disgustingly pro-EU Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation’s website – exhibit 1 me’lud
The government is acting to end the prosecution of so-called "metric martyrs" - traders who continue to sell goods using only imperial measures
I am frankly aghast at the news that:
a) once-Great Britain has such a thing as the Department for Innovation, Universities, Skills & Innovations – that sounds to me like another load of jobsworths, living high on the hog while on the taxpayers nickel
and
b) the aforementioned jobsworths have the temerity to think that they have a say in whether your humble correspondent buys a pound of apples or not.
However, putting aside the fact that all of these public sector spongers should have been culled at their desks years ago, why exactly does it take the no doubt very diligent members of the aforementioned government department "months" to do anything?
The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills said Innovations Secretary John Denham would introduce new guidelines within months that would prevent local authorities from taking traders to court
This sort of thing drives me mad. It fills me with resolve to get back on a plane to Blighty & set up a market stall which only sells in Imperial Measures. If some yellow jacketed clipboard wielding trading standards officer had the temerity to come slithering up to me, they would be given the following options:
1. Purchase produce in a measure that has served stout bulldogs well, that we know, understand & love - even buying things by the pound is probably a offence in Brown's Britain, let alone selling them... or
2. Make an early morning appointment to come & visit me at home. I will be waiting…
Rope Required - Part 2
So as government borrowing reaches its highest level since 1946…
Gordon Brown has rejected criticism of record levels of government borrowing - saying it was the "right policy" during the current economic climate
& what little is left of our pension plans after Comrade Brown raided it while he was Chancellor has been completely decimated by recent share losses
Britain's biggest companies may need to put aside up to £150 billion to repair the damage inflicted on their pension schemes by huge falls in share prices. Experts suggested yesterday that the vast majority of company schemes would need more capital if they are to guarantee to meet their obligations to staff who have yet to retire
The public sector have been busy looking after themselves…
Pension pots belonging to the men in charge of steering the economy through the financial downturn have risen in the past year to a record £138 million, The Times can reveal. While the value of UK pension funds has plummeted by a quarter this year, the generous final-salary schemes of just over 200 top mandarins have risen by £16million.
I would normally say that there might be a case for more Parliamentary oversight. However even that isnt possible because while civil servants have been blagging themselves bigger pensions, the other half of the Westminster have been awarding themselves longer holidays
MPs came under fire last night for taking a bumper 24-day holiday at Christmas while the country faces the prospect of recession
No point trying to argue the merits of what is going on here (we are being right royally shafted as usual), please would someone just round’em all up & send them down to Free Market Towers. The lynching tree is ready & waiting
October 20, 2008
October 14, 2008
Enter Comrade Brown
The financial crisis was indeed a failure of regulation. The system was overwhelmed by innovation. Regulators are going to have to catch up &, you could say, try to hold innovation back. The question to ponder is this: in which other industries will curbing innovation – also known as market forces – strike governments or voters, in the US or anywhere else, as a good idea?
Clive Crook
Watching a few current affairs programmes over the weekend, your humble correspondent couldn’t help but be struck by the calls from just about everyone for all bankers to be strung up with even greater alacrity than some 500 hundred years ago, the good citizens of Middlesbrough hung a monkey in the mistaken belief that this ships mascot was a shipwrecked survivor from the defeated Spanish armada.
Clearly hoodies, illegal immigrants or our home-grown Jihadis are no longer a threat: in fact at the rate we seem to be going, forget downloading plans for a dirty bomb … even being in possession of a chalk striped suit will earn you a stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The whole current financial fiasco is starting to highlight once-Great Britain’s most unpleasant personality trait – envy. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti declared in March of this year that the accumulation of “excessive wealth” was one of the seven modern social sins & we in the UK have aleady luanched the Inquisition
The socialists with their creed of collectivism are now in the ascendancy & it is worth pointing out at this juncture that as a percentage of GDP, the amount that Comrade Brown has spent nationalising the British financial services industry over the last few days far exceeds the amounts spunked away by his socialist heroes on the wholesale nationalisation of British industry post-WW2.
Just for the record, post bale out public sector debt now exceeds 50% of annual national income; a level not seen since Sunny Jim Callaghan went cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund in 1977. Actually depending upon the accounting standard used, public sector debt might well be in the region of 70 – 100% of annual national income. So much for the ‘Iron Chancellor’ eh?
Couple that with the increasing demands to retribution to be meted out on the heads of those companies that comprise a fifth of the UK economy: the same said companies whose Corporation Tax returns have been helping pay the bloated public spending programmes of the last 11 years. Oh yes, & then there’s the small matter of anti-terrorist laws being used to seize the estimated £4bn of UK assets Landsbanki – at the rate we are going you can forget the Maypole, May Day Parades are going to be taking on a completely aspect under the leadership of our current Great Helmsman.
October 8, 2008
How to survive gobal financial meltdown
Shamelessly right clicked from Mr Juggles over at Long or Short Capital
I have been stuffing my pillowcases with Krugerrands in anticipation of the bailout bill and the inflation that is surely to follow. I recommend you invest in gold, silver, and guns. Further diversification into mackerel is also desirable. This currency has the benefits of being more liquid (oriented) and tastier than the dollar. Additionally, you can already use it to purchase haircuts, food, and other items and services throughout the US*.
*prison system
October 7, 2008
Its only a matter of time...
Stock markets braced for more economic turmoil etc etc etc ... asian markets fall in early trading blah blah blah ... it must be about time to wheel out those aging minstrels & troubadours again
October 2, 2008
What have the Romans ever done for us?
As Reg, the indomidable leader of the Peoples Front of Judea (or is that the Judean Peoples Front) says,
… apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Exactly the same might be said about capitalism & free markets at the moment. Indeed a cursory look at my Financial Times this morning shows the increasing pressure that the global financial markets are under – indeed these pressures are not decreasing & have now spread to the European banks over the last few days. There is no escaping it. With the now passing in the United States of the US$ 700 billion bail out plan, the only thing that is drowning out the tsumani of financial bad news, are the howls, predominantaly from the left for something to be done about it – by which they mean a myriad new laws, financial regulations, wholesale nationalisations & a return to protectionism.
Actually it goes much further than that, it is an all out assault upon the capitalist system that they loath so passionately. In fact if your average sandal wearing bearded liberal didn’t embrace aethism with such quasi-regilious fevor (irony alert), they would be out in the streets waving placards demanding, in thick green crayon, a return to the sort agricultural theocracy that served Ireland so well that it turned the entire country in to a nation of refugees for half a century.
So this morning dear readers, the question is What have the Romans ever done for us?
Or to put it another into more modern parlance, why don’t we just do away the anything that might constitute the free follow of goods & capital by regulating everything to death. So actually have those evil bankers, the epitomy of the free market & the new social pariahs, every done for us?
The other day, I was much taken by a post on Mark Easton’s blog which shows how the World ecnomy has developed of the last 2,000 years & the following cartograms which he used are taken from The Atlas of the Real World. They show areas of the World, not by geographic size, but in this instance, their relative economic importance as calculated by GDP defined as the total market value of all goods and services produced within a territory in a given year. The figures are also adjusted for purchasing power parity.
To put that into perspective, in 1AD the average global GDP per living person was US$ 445. Of course at that time wold & headdress fashioned out of badger skins didn’t cost very much so it didn’t really matter. By 1990 the global average GDP per living person had grown to US$ 5,248 on a like for like basis.
1 AD
So we start off in 1AD. China is doing very nicely & clearly the IT outsourcing business is going well in India. Europe doesn’t really exist, it is at that time the Roman Empire which is why both it & Asia Minor show up well. Europe will continue to do well until the combination of the Germans & East Europeans decide to wreck the place, a trend that we sadly see repeated. Russia doesn’t really figure economically, a recurrent theme, but Africa does – at least for the time being & until such time as they invent mirrored sunglasses, medals & dictactor sized epaulettes.
On the left hand side of the pond, in South America the locals are busy offering human sacrifices to the Sunny D god & North Amercia hardly registers – nor does it until boat loads of heavily armed religious exiles from Europe show up & actually do something with the place. As an aside here, the next time you hear some Birkenstock shod liberal waxing lyrical about native culture, its worth pointing out that that is the same native culture that eschewed developing the resources of a continent in favour of face painting & passing round tabacco products. This is also the reason why Australia doesn’t show up until Whitey does.
1500
By 1500, most Europeans have stopped strapping bits of dead animal to their heads right up until the Brigade of Guards were invented. The Benlux countries were the richest in the World – probably something to do the the evolution of the Protestant Work Ethic, a concept that continental Europe is doing its best to eschew these days
1900
By 1900, Great Britain was the place to be. Britannia ruled, gentlemen wore sensible hats & everyone held their knife & folk correctly. The industrial revolution had been felt around the World & North America has showed up on the scene. In fact between 1500 & 1900 the world average of Gross Domestic Product per person had doubled. In 1900 the world total GDP was US$2 trillion when compared to 1990 values. Mercantilism was dead, capitalism & the free markets were starting to kick in. Viva comparative advantage
1960
In 1960 most of the World’s wealth was in North America & Western Europe. Overall wealth distribution is similar to that in 1900, except that Asia was going down the U-bend. GDP was starting to rise in the Middle East because of oil, but just remember, to this day the non-oil output of the Arab world is less than Finland’s. Oh yes, have a look a China. Having embraced command economy communism with a vengeance, it had gone into economic reverse.
1990
By 1990 Asia has got its act together & everyone is getting richer. Apart from in Africa. Again. China is politically a communist dictatorship politically, economical it is a rampant free market & Lexus salesmen are making very respectable bonuses. World GDP rose from US$8 trillion to US$27 trillion over those thirty years. Looks like those liberal economies aren't delivering the goods then!
& so to the future
2015
The projected wealth of China in 2015 could mean it producing 27% of all the wealth in the world, if the economic trends established between 1975 and 2002 continue for another 13 years. In year 1 of the current era China produced 26% of the wealth in the world, but very slowly declined to generating only 5% of the world total in 1960.
So, over 2,000 years, free markets have delivered tremendous increases in standards of living to the Western economies that have embraced them. China to reverse the declines it suffered over the period in question has had to introduce similar reforms so that its peoples can start to enjoy similar standards of living. But now consider this, at currently US$ 16,800 bn, the EU’s GDP is 5 times bigger than China’s. In terms of GDP per capita, Europeans are 13 times richer than their counterparts in China. So to return to the question at the top of the page, free markets togther with everything that goes with that both good & bad have delivered. It’s a shame then that so many people in the West seem to devote so much time & energy trying to destroy them.
Oh yes, I nearly forgot, just one final thought…
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom
Milton Friedman
September 30, 2008
September 28, 2008
Your start the week sub prime credit crunch fun
This from Gweilicus
& this from Mark & as well as one more to finish up with
September 26, 2008
September 22, 2008
Welcome to the United Socialist States of America
It is said that the events of 9-11 will define American foreign policy for a generation. Well why not put your feet you, pour yourself a gentleman’s measure of single malt, spark up a smoko & consider this; the events of 9-15 will define American domestic policy & how it relates to a formerly free market for a generation & possibly forever.
The Financial Era, heralded by Regan, Thatcher & the deregulation of financial services on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the 1980’s is dead. It has ceased to be. Last week the USA took huge strides towards to the European socialist socio-economic model that the Democratic Party loves so much. In November, if the American electorate returns Obama to the White House, the United Socialist States of America may well be born soon after.
Over the last few days not only have investors lost hundreds of billions of US$s but now the increasingly few remaining independent investment banks are being forced into consolidations with Main Street banks. That way the publics’ savings accounts can be used to underwrite losses on complex smoke & mirrors financial products that it now transpires, no-one ever understood in the first place.
Whilst these mergers might provide some short term respite, the separation of so-called i-banks & commercial banks arose from the banking collapses that heralded the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Once stability returned, the US Federal Government deemed quite correctly that it was way too dangerous for investment & commercial banking activities to be co-joined, hence why they were separated & indeed that degree of separation was enforced by the Glass Steagall Act: that act has been repealed.
Where i-banks & other financial institutions can’t be forced in mergers, the American public is buying back in their broken remains a la Freddie, Fanny & AIG. In fact the US Government isn’t just propping up failing financial institutions,
it has begun a programme of economic interventionism more typical of socialist governments in moments of utopian zeal.
With the creation of a ‘recovery vehicle’ using US$750m of the publics’ money, the nationalization of large parts of America’s financial services industry has commenced on a scale not seen since a bankrupt Great Britain, having spent the accumulated wealth of 400 years of Empire to fight two World Wars, went socialist in 1945. It is worth remembering that
the significance of socialism in the first British nationalisations after the Second World War was is that they involved the engine of the domestic economy (coal) and the repository of the nations wealth (Bank of England). What is the engine of US economy? Financial services. What is the main repository of American wealth? Housing
Politicians have been ever quick to blame someone else for current financial woes branding hedge funds & short sellers as the fifth & sixth horsemen of the (financial) Apocalypse, blind as ever to the truth that short selling is nothing new. In fact the first recorded short seller in history was one Issac Le Maire, a ship owner from Amsterdam who in 1609 didn’t just short sell stock, he shorted his own stock. Imagine what the SEC & FSA would have to say about such a trade these days?
So without public consultation/scrutiny, in America the laws governing short selling were changed & the New York Attorney General has commenced an inquisition investigation into the activities of hedge funds. Now ask yourself this when you next have a quiet moment & you are refilling your glass – what sort of laws are they that can be arbitrarily changed in the dead of night? Eurocrats delight in such behavior.
Actually in the finest traditions on the Turkeys/Christmas Paradigm, the irony about the whole short selling of Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley & Goldman Sachs stock is that in order to short these stocks, amoral hedge funds needed to borrow stock through the mechanism provided by their so-called ‘prime brokers’. Now a starter for US$ 750 billion or so: See if you can name the biggest players in the prime broking market? Yes that’s right, the biggest players were Lehmans, Morgan Stanley & Goldman Sachs.
Now couple the nationalisation of the financial services industry with new SEC arbitrary regulations to contain the workings of a formerly free market & consider how America (& indeed to a slightly lesser extent, the UK) got to where it is today – not even a free market or cabal of evil Jewish bankers can do that – no, that takes a government & out of control government spending to be precise.
Whilst some or the current financial woes can be laid on the doorstep of the wider market & some young men of marginal intellect who simply didn’t understand what they were buying or selling – the US Federal Government must also shoulder a large portion of blame for the current woes.
George W Bush’s sins may be myriad, but his single greatest failing hasn’t been to fail to curtail government spending, it is in fact to oversee a massive increase in the amount the American Government spends & because governments always live beyond their means, the amount that it owes. This has grown significantly under GWB, currently topping out at US$ 9 trillion … !
This increasingly massive government debt has started to be coupled with a loss of appetite for US$ denominated investments. If the Federal Government has been profligate, the American public has been even worse with its insatiable appetite for cheap imported products. This has given exporter nations (e.g. China) the liquidity to buy US Government paper which the US Government has in turn used to fund its bloating spending. However that is starting to change.
Last week, 3 month US Treasuries, previously considered to be the worlds safest paper, were trading at their lowest level since 1941. Why? Because purchasers (foreign governments) tired with loosing money on US Treasuries because of a weakening US$ are starting to consider to moving their holdings into Euros or indeed their own currencies causing a vicious spiral of further US$ depreciation leading to further sell offs of US Government paper. What exactly is the imperative for the Chinese Government to hold US Government paper when the US$ is devaluing against the RMB at the rate of approximately 6% p.a.?
Now does the US Government have the money to service these debts, let alone repay them? Of course not. To date they have managed to by borrowing even more in the form of … yes you guessed it … even more US$ denominated Government paper. The analogy here is that this isn’t paying off one credit card with another credit card; this is making the minimum payment each month by raising the credit limit on the same said credit card. Each month.
But what does that mean? An already bloated Government that is in the process of having to borrow even more to support its nationalisation programme won't be able to borrow to even service its existing debts let alone pay off the portion of debt that is maturing. So will a USSA go bankrupt? No, but it will have to raise additional funding i.e raise taxes & that is never & has never been a formula for long term economic growth.
Now dear readers let’s one last drink & bolt all of the forgoing together. Laws are being changed without real political oversight. Couple that with the nationalisation of the financial services industry & the Democratic Party’s nominee’s promises of taxpayer provide healthcare, US$ 25 billion of bail out payments to American carmakers & US$ 50 billion in "transfer payments" to the poor. Does any of that sound familiar to anyone? It does on this side of the Pond. Welcome to the United Socialist States of America. Maybe.
September 20, 2008
Of Afghanistan, regime change & global financial meltdown
Quite a few commentors have reported over the last few days that the Labour Government that has lorded it over once Great Britain since 1997 is probably on the point of collapsing into the potmess of idealogical bitch slapping. Deep joy! My only little sadness at this long overdue event is that the forthcoming regime change will probably be bloodless. In fact I can’t even begin to describe my disappointment at that prospect – not that we will most likely get a change of government quite soon - but the coup d’etat will be achieved without recourse to force of arms. Still, in the absence of the Westminster Village & its incumbents being consumed in a fireball resulting from a statisically unlikely meteor strike, grafting yourself onto the sofa of sloth with a bottle of something dark n’ peaty to watch the socialists start to quite literally purge one & other is possibly nearly as much fun as you would have shooting pheasants from a vodka jello filled hot tub with;
a)Ms Hurley,
b)Ms Blanchet,
c)Ms Bonham-Carter,
d) Ms Phillips,
e) All of the above,
for company. Now you might disagree with some of the names on that list but I am sure that you get my drift.
At this point dear readers is worth casting a beery bloodshot eye over the history of the North West Frontier when considering pondlife Brown’s forthcoming demise. During Great Britain’s first little foray into Afghanistan, it was common when engaging the enemy for NCOs to walk up & down in front of the lines of formed up infantry & shout “Come on Johnny Afghan, show us what your made of”. This practice ceased sometime during the First Retreat from Kabul. Not so long ago Brown received such plaudits as ‘The Iron Chancellor’ & ‘Mr Prudence’ - laughable assertions at the time & even more comic with the benefit of hindsight.
Brown spent a decade taxing & spending, only being bailed out by a growing economy. My my, what a different 18 months makes. Bear, Northern Rock, Fannie & Freddie, Merrills, Lehmans – all gone in their current form. Both Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley are dead in the water. At very best their business models are shattered. Both probably only have weeks left in their current form although looking at where their respective paper was trading on Friday afternoon, weeks is probably optimistic – days are more likely. The vultures have already started to circle.
Of course the like of Brown & his scum sucking spawn ilk were all ready to take the credit when the markets were rising – now that are in dramatic reverse, they are quite content to assign all the blame to an evil cabal investment bankers. No surprise really.
September 16, 2008
September 15, 2008
Of Disappointment, Large Hadron Colliders & Ed Balls
Am I just wondering if I am alone in my disappointment that the World didn’t end last week? I mean there were no end of scientists (whose academic credentials are only matched by the thickness of their glasses) claiming that when the switch in Switzerland got flicked, we were all going to be consumed by anti-matter. & there was me worrying that may be it wasn’t just the World that was as risk: could this device cause a chain reaction that might cause the entire Universe to collapse upon itself as all of its thermal & mechanical functions failed …surely that would render all human endeavour rather pointless. So I stayed in bed this weekend.
However the World didn’t end, baby polar bears keep drowning, we all have to go back to work this morning & the Swiss can go back to making cuckoo clocks or whatever it is they do when they are not calculating the current open market value of all the Nazi bullion they are still hoarding.
So in the absence of the arrival of the Four Horsemen, it looks like your humble correspondent will have to go back to working out how the hell he is ever going to pay off his credit cards & the doom mongering scientists can go back to issuing dire warnings about melting ice caps while trying to fit just one more biro into their lab coats top pocket.
Ho hum!
Of course dear readers, I don’t actually want some over blown Heath Robinson device to cause the Laws of Physics to be reversed but lets be honest here, we could all have had a jolly good laugh if say just a tiny amount of dark matter had been produced: just enough to consume France & of course Brussels. In fact in that instance I’d have been straight down to the my local Large Hadron Collider franchise asking if I could have one too & given the financial malaise that grips the global capital markets, how much dealer discount they are currently offering.
Now while we are on the subject of disappointment, the other disappointments last week includes the fact that HM Government continues to show just how much it despises us stout bulldogs & is now considering buying new ultra long range speed cameras although in combustion tests, whilst they might be able to photograph you breaking the speed limit by 2 mph at a distance of 125 miles, they burn just as well as the current crop of Gatsos.
In fact going out & putting half a dozen or so of these digital piggy banks to the torch before retiring to your local for a tummy full of finest foaming & a spot of badger baiting in the car park after closing time is just about the most fun that you have in the absence of being given a mandate to lynch that smug little git Ed Balls on primetime TV.
Now there are some out there that maintain that the sight of Balls-Up doing the lamppost tango is a far better fate the he deserves & that’s a reasonable point. Whilst in the past I have advocated a wide ranging cull of the legal profession, just about every inhabitant of the Westminster Village, MEPs, Guardian readers & anyone that worships at the high altar of global warming, the projected viewing figures of Ed Balls enduring a painful death with gratuitous use of extreme close ups shots from the ‘Claw Hammer Cam’ make for a compelling commercial argument, aside from the fact that such a piece of reality TV would receive critical acclaim.
If fact, were I not currently in Hong Kong & might well be minded to track down the Right Honorable Member for Normanton & engineer his demise. Recent polling suggests that an overwhelming majority of the UK’s population would like to see this piece of prime pondlife with one of Mr Stanley’s most excellent products hanging out of the back of his cranium. Who am I to disagree?
Sadly I can't because I am here & he is there, so instead I’d better go to the office now, man made black holes allowing.
September 8, 2008
Professors with placards v Real men with firearms ?
Whilst your humble correspondent is happy to opine on a wide range of topics I don’t for a moment purport to be an expert on Texas, having visited the State only once. However from my admittedly very limited knowledge of that part of the world, I would say that former Congressman Charlie Wilson is held in reasonably high esteem by his former constituents.
Quickly scanning the news, before getting on my afternoon flight, it would seem that not everyone holds Mr Wilson in such high regard
Good time Charlie, the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing Texan politician played by Tom Hanks in the film Charlie Wilson’s War, is facing a new battle.
Plans to endow a Charlie Wilson chair in Pakistan studies at the University of Texas have riled the college’s liberal academics, who feel he is too “gung-ho” to be a role model for students.
They say Wilson’s support for Afghans fighting Soviet occupiers during the 1980s, when he covertly funnelled American government aid to the mujaheddin, led to the rise of the Taliban and its allies in al-Qaeda. “ It is outrageous,” said Dana Cloud, professor of communications at the university. “I thought it was a joke.”
Cloud, who is spearheading a global online petition against the chair, said that if the university did not abandon the plan, she would organise demonstrations by professors with placards. “A Charlie Wilson chair brings our university into ridicule,” she said. “I do not know one serious scholar who would take such a post.”
So a load of beardy liberal ‘academics’ are going to hold a protest march - & not just a protest march, one that is going to involve placards to boot. Gulp!
Now this is one protest that I so hope goes ahead & with a little luck, friends in Texas (who are not noted for being kindly disposed to such individuals as liberal academics) might even take if upon themselves to provide us with a first hand account of the event …once the happy crackle of gunfire has died anyway & the ‘bag’ is being counted.
& now all this really big stuff has been sorted...
Today, my heart is uplifted & I am consumed with joy. Regular readers will know that this is in marked contrast to my normal jaundiced & cynical disposition. However over the weekend things have changed – events of global proportions that impact upon the world’s future have taken place. Yes, sometime over the last 48 hours, tectonic plates stopped moving, all third world poverty ceased, global financial institutions were miraculously recapitalised & little fluffy baby poplar bears stopped drowning. The planets are now all in alignment & the birds are all signing in the trees … but not too loudly mind you because they mustn’t incur the wrath of local council noise monitoring officers.
But Tweety Pie aside, now that the world has under gone the incredible metamorphosis while your humble correspondent was in the pub, our EU masters now have time to turn their attentions to fine tuning their EU-topia because all the big stuff has been sorted out. Consequently, they can now turn their attentions to these no less important issues…
MEPs want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes. This could potentially mean an end to attractive women advertising perfume, housewives in the kitchen or men doing DIY.
Such classic adverts as the Diet Coke commercial featuring the bare-chested builder, or Wonderbra's "Hello Boys" featuring model Eva Herzigova would have been banned. The new rules come in a report by the EU's women's rights committee.
Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising. She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a "zero-tolerance" policy against "sexist insults or degrading images".
Ms Svensson said: "Gender stereotyping in advertising straitjackets women, men, girls and boys by restricting individuals to predetermined and artificial roles that are often degrading, humiliating and dumbed down for both sexes."
Miz Svensson & wow, isnt she just an oil painting
while on the British taxpayers nickle, clearly has the sort of sense of perspective that will be essential to achieving a federal harmonised & fair Europe Union.
Of course given my way, Miz Svensson & all of her ilk would be beaten to death in the streets for talking such utter utter bollocks - however the Westminster Village knows better & seems only too ready to impliement the increasingly absurd imperial edicts that are issued from Brussels & Strasbourg, forgetting that not so long ago, a more sensible generation of stout bulldogs invented such things as the 12,000 lb blast bomb precisly for this very reason – to halt any further attempts a European intergration
Liberals: Always right
From Clive Crook in this mornings Financial Times
This article is not the first to note the cultural contradiction in American liberalism, but just now the point bears restating. The election may turn on it.
Democrats speak up for the less prosperous; they have well-intentioned policies to help them; they are disturbed by inequality, and want to do something about it. Their concern is real and admirable. The trouble is, they lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.
Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.
It is an attitude that a good part of the US media share. The country has conservative media (Fox News, talk radio) as well as liberal media (most of the rest). Curiously, whereas the conservative media know they are conservative, much of the liberal media believe themselves to be neutral.
Their constant support for Democratic views has nothing to do with bias, in their minds, but reflects the fact that Democrats just happen to be right about everything. The result is the same: for much of the media, the fact that Republicans keep winning can only be due to the backwardness of much of the country.
September 7, 2008
Just picking up on a comment I made last week...
new pictures show that SNP Leader Alex Salmond doesn't just look like Shrek, he is Shrek
From Theo at Last of the Few
Meeeeeejar coverage
I have just seen this on the wires
Tampa Florida (AP). In a move certain to alienate secular and progressive voters, God Almighty Himself took the form of an old, grey haired man today, to endorse another old, grey haired man, John McCain. In a spectacular event obviously designed to impress and intimidate voters, God, followed by a host of flying angles carrying flaming swords and threatening looking palm branches, walked hand in hand with McCain across the waters of Hillsborough Bay, coming ashore on a fashionable stretch of Bayshore Boulevard in front of waiting press cameras. Traffic on the busy thoroughfare was backed up for miles in both directions, forcing the temporary closure of a local seafood resturant and preventing honest commuters from getting to work and school. The flying host of angels forced Tampa Airport to close for over two hours, disrupting thousands of people's vacation travel plans, and snarling air traffic up and down the East Coat.
Of course this little piece hasnt just come in on the news wires, it was sent to me a few days ago. However it is a pretty good spoof & doesnt highlight how very balanced a lot of the media coverage of the US elections has been to date.
More under the fold...
McCain's open embrace of God was seen as the latest in a series of gaffes and missteps that have plagued the campaign. "In accepting God's endorsement McCain has tied himself even closer to the single most highly controversial figure in American Politics." stated Professor Richard Wanker of Beltway University. "God is a long term opponent of abortion rights, and is on record as making openly homophobic statements. God claims a Jewish heritage, but there have been rumors linking Him to various anti-Semitic causes for years, and His use of the title "Creator" won't stand well with people who believe in evolution or the separation of Church and State. Polls show that, depite His claims to be all about love and forgiveness, God is seen as a highly judgemental and polarizing figure by most voters; and His claim to be "King of King and Lord of Lords" exposes dangerious monarchist and totalitarian tendancies. I have to say that He is very much out of the mainstream, and I don't see how this can help McCain at all."
The spectacular and disruptive form of the endorsement was widely criticized as well. Media Analyst Cricket Felsenkopf from the Columbia School of Communications in New York issued a typical critique. "The way the two of them walked across the waters of the bay only highlights McCain inability to swim. It makes him look old and unathletic. The average voter doesn't walk on water, they swim. JFK knew that, he was a great swimmer. All the Kennedy's are great swimmers; Obama swims like a fish, he's full of youth, energy, and vigor. McCain? He walks across the top of the waves, holding hands with an old guy in a robe. Nobody does that. This only serves to emphasize how old and out of touch McCain is."
When asked to comment on these media reports McCain's press secretary could only roll his eyes and say "What is it with you people?" in a sarcastic and patronizing tone.
September 5, 2008
of Sarah Palin, Ethelred the Unready & smelly trousers
To date your humble correspondent has steered clear of the forthcoming American presidential elections mainly because I am completely bored to death of the whole topic already - the process seems to have taken longer than the decline & ultimate fall of the Assyrian Empire, & yet the voting doesn’t even start until November.
Needless to say, the BBC (aka the Democratic Broadcasting Corporation) has already devoted huge amounts of time & the British taxpayers’ money to the handbagging that went on between Metrosexual Man & that Hatchet Faced Harridan because it was a win –win situation: ethnic minority or a woman. Two of their favourite causes. & when Mr Metrosexual didn’t put she who’s name shall not be mentioned on the ‘ticket’, there was a palpable gnashing of teeth from Broadcasting House & the bistros of Notting Hill.
Then there is the other party, the one that all good Euro-trash loathes. The party that nominated an OAP that it didn’t really like. Just how clever was that then? In fact when it comes to McCain, I am afraid that I just don’t buy it. He was a POW. Whilst I understand that the room service in the Hanoi Hilton leaves something to be desired, but he was a pilot right? Why wasn’t he building a secret glider in the attic or fashioning an enemy officer’s uniform out of discarded chopsticks & rice paper? Clearly McCain is no Pat Reid.
Anyway moving quickly on while ducking, McCain has put Palin on the ticket & the collective wailing has already started in White City. Funny how Metrosexual Man’s lack of Washington experience wasn’t perceived as a weakness in the op-ed columns of The Guardian but it’s a BIG issue when it comes to Mrs Palin. Staying on the subject Guardianistas, better still, it appears that Mrs P knows her way around a firearm & boy do they hate that.
Pictures like the above are a cue for PSH in the whinebars of Hoxton & other such parts of London that frequented by vermin journalists & the liberal left.
Indeed there does seem to be a lot to like about Mrs P. As we have already touched upon, she knows her way around a firearm. Tick. Secondly, when appointed governor she started selling off unnecessary government assets - & not through some over priced broker but on eBay. Another tick. Judging from my inbox over the last few days which is now bulging with emails of Mrs P, suitably attired i.e. armed, the dismay at her nomination in 'progressive' circles is far outweighed by the enthusiasm that many of my dear readers already have for her. In fact a trawl around various right thinking web sites seems to reveal that if the Republican Party were to do the smart thing (& political parties never ever do the smart thing, even conservative ones) one of McCain’s old war wounds should ‘flare up’, he could step aside. Palin would then romp home in November on the united conservative & womens vote, combined with the gun lobby.
The one thing that I haven’t yet got my addled mind around yet is the whole Hockey Mom thing. Being a Limey I am not sure that I fully understand the difference between a Hockey Mom & Soccer Mom save for the fact that hockey is a reasonably violent game (certainly it is the way that my sister The Surf Bum, used to play it) whereas the dreaded round ball game is a pastime reserved for inarticulate yobbos & preening poftahs.
However setting that little confusion to one side until I get a few come back bracers on board this evening, I am not sure that Palin is quite ready to assume the mantle of an American Mrs T – to date I haven’t seen knocking seven bells out of some Froggie politician with an oversized handbag but given time, no doubt she will learn that even to this day the very sight of such a ladies accoutrement induces post traumatic stress disorder & rapidly dilating sphincters right the way along the Champs-Élysées.
But staying with the Mrs T theme for a little, I have just scribbled down I list of what I consider to be once Great Britains great leaders. Half are men, half are women.
First in the XY corner we have Winston Churchill for obvious reasons. Then Alfred the Great because he was great & then one of the stoutest bulldogs of all time, Richard Lionheart. Next King Cnut for having such a fantastic name & incidentally Cnut is the correct form - Canute was a later misspelling by revisionist historians to make him sound more English. Now on the topic of names, this list would not be complete without Eric Bloodaxe. His name isn’t just ‘cool’, but in the big scheme of things is as close to absolute zero as it is possible for mortal man to get.
In the XX camp we have Boudicca for opposing European intergration. Next up, Elizabeth I for sucessfully opposing European intergration. Then Victoria I for overseeing the subjugation of a large part of the global & Mrs T for not just opposing European intergration but for ingendering such fear & loathing amoung the Euro-trash that it persists to this day. To finish this list & no list would be complete without her, our current Regent.
So my list is evenly split which is interesting given all that glass ceiling nonsense but as I have long maintained, once Great Britain has been better served by its few women rulers than by say the likes of Ethelred the Unready.
Now it we hop back over to the other side of the pond, Mrs P is certainly not yet in the same class a Mrs T, but give her time, because she is showing a lot of potential. & I do mean a lot.
All she needs to do now is aquire a sensible hangbag, learn to say “non” & from Berkeley to Bayern Munich we might be greeted to the joyous sound of liberals & Euro-federalists filling their fairtrade sweat pants & lederhosen with poo. How much fun would that be?
This might all just have started to get very very interesting!
September 4, 2008
Hamas is welcome to her
Tony Blair's sister-in-law is stuck in the Gaza Strip today after entering the territory without a permit as part of a human rights mission. Lauren Booth, sister of the former Prime Minister's wife Cherie, has been refused entry into both Israel and Egypt after arriving in Hamas-run territory by boat from Cyprus 12 days ago.
She travelled to Gaza as part of a human rights mission called the Free Gaza Movement, which aims to draw attention to the international blockade of the territory. Israel says it is under no obligation to allow her entry so she can fly home from Tel Aviv because she had entered Gaza without permission. Egypt, meanwhile, claims it refused her entry through its Rafah crossing point because it had been open for humanitarian traffic only.
“It could be days, weeks or years before I can leave, depending on the mood of the Israeli authorities,” she told The Times, adding that she was upset she could not be with her children as they began the school year
"Our strategic objectives - building a Scotland that is safer, stronger, greener, healthier, smarter, wealthier & fairer"
… by introducing local income tax at a rate of 3%, banning under-21s from buying alcohol from off-licences & restricting the display of tobacco in shops. & so Scotland takes another step down the road to becoming the socialist workers paradise.
Reading about Alex Salmond’s latest bout of control freakery, yes, give the place independence so that they can turn it into yet another European high tax hell hole. First the corporates will leave. Those with any drive or initiative left long ago - as the customer base of many London pubs is testament to.
Yet Salmond thinks that
There should be no limits to our ambitions for this nation
Maybe our ambition for Scotland should be that may be one day, we can stop sending them billions of pounds of subsidies each year. Oh, & by the way, is it just me or is anyone one else reminded of the Scottish First Minister every time they see a picture of Shrek??
August 28, 2008
The Olympics have finished. Let the bickering commence
So the Olympics have finished. Thank goodness for that. Frankly, even when sober I couldn’t be anymore ambivalent to the whole spectacle, especially given that in the finest traditions of a modern outward looking China, half of the opening ceremony would appear to have been errrrr ‘enhanced’. Still, I suppose it is fair to say that quiet a few people might well approve of Pamela Andersons ‘enhanced’ chest. But forget Pammie’s silicone mountains if you can for just a moment, whether its copy handbags in Shenzhen, voiceovers or judicious use of CGI at an opening ceremony, you just can’t beat the boys from Beijing when it comes to knocking out fakes.
Still, no sooner have the games finished than the bickering can begin. The Septics are claiming that they won more medals, while on the other hand, the Chinese a banging on about how many gold medals they have. Frankly who cares? I am sure that leaping around on some mats twirling a streamer behind you is a very worthy pursuit, but I can’t see that it merits getting all hot around the collar about. Oh yes, & please feel free to argue about who is the greatest Olympian of all time & when you reach a consensus, come & tell me – I’ll be in the bar.
Then there are the Frogs are upset about something (again) & some doubt seems to be being cast on the age of some of the Chinese gymnasts. Now the gymnastics is another event that I didn’t bother watching but by all accounts, some of those little Chinese girls would have had Gary Glitter breaking into an uncontrollable sweat. Again, dancing around on a mat that’s all great but the only vault that I am interested in is full of dosh … preferably exhorted from third world coffee bean farmers or better still, their widows & orphans.
Most recently, our Olympic hosts are all in a tizzy because Boris didn’t have his suit’s coat buttoned up & he wasn’t deferential respectful enough when handed the Olympic flag. Clearly he should he have been deferential respectful in the same way that the Chinese para-military police were deferential respectful to local laws when they marched around the globe with the Olympic flame ….. & while we are on the subject to Olympic flames, did it actually get to the top of Everest or was that a photoshop creation as well?
To return of the theme at the top of this page, I am bored bored bored of the whole bruhaha Aside from rugby & cricket, there are only 3 sports: hunting, shooting & fishing. The rest are merely pastimes. Treat the whole politico-Olympic thing with contempt that it deserves as there is a really important sporting date coming up next week (the opening of the partridge shooting season) & leave competitive push biking to those that care about such things.
August 18, 2008
Its all in the name
A supertax on high earners should be considered as part of Gordon Brown’s autumn fight-back, a minister says today. Ivan Lewis, writing in The Sunday Times, calls on the government to introduce a new economic package to bail out the hard-pressed middle classes – possibly paid for by new taxes on the rich. The health minister warns that urgent steps must be taken to protect the living standards of the “mainstream majority” of comfortably off voters who swept Labour to power in 1997.
Translation: We Nu Labour have ruthlessly & without compunction taxed the living daylights out of Blighty’s middles classes to the point that anyone with any drive or initative, devotes large proportions of each day trying to work out how to leave the country.
We now want to tax the living daylights out of the richest (& most economically mobile) portion of society so that they will leave the country as well.
The net result will be a country composed on chavs, dole moles, economically inactive migrants & social security junkies – in fact anyone that depends upon the State for a living…because that’s the way that we socialists like it.
In fact dear readers the clue is the Minister for Health’s christian name. Nuff said?
As concepts go, I just love this one…
Motorists are being warned they may face "pay as you drive" road taxes as ministers launch the first ever trials of a scheme that could see them charged for every mile they drive. The Telegraph can disclose that the Government is pushing ahead with plans for a national road-pricing scheme, including testing "spy in the sky" technology.
Eight areas of the country have been selected by ministers for secret pay-per-mile trials which will begin in 2010 and are expected to pave the way for tolls on motorways.Motorists face paying up to £1.30 a mile during peak periods on the busiest roads.
Really this should come as no surprise, given that since the end of WWII, once Great Britain has steadily & inextricably slid towards being a socialist command economy. However regular readers might be surprised to find that this is one government proposal that I heartily support.
Through dint of luck rather than hard work or judgement, I am in a position to be able to afford to “pay as I drive” & these proposals wont affect where or when I drive either of my ecosystem destroying 4x4s. It will however impact the less economically fortunate & that’s no bad thing.
One of the major factors in modern road conjestion is all of those poor people in their old slow cars getting in the my way. Therefore I am delighted that they will be taxed off the road. Indeed, my traditionalist tendencies can only appluad the fact that the lower social classes will be consigned to living their lives with walking distance of their place of birth. Nothing like going back to the old days. This will leave the roads free for those of us with money (i.e. in the finest traditons of Nu Labour) to drive where we please & when we please with getting stuck behind some old jelopy.
Taking this reasoning to its logical conclusion, so now we are to discriminate against the poor in a manner which even the most Dickensian government could have dreamed of, who is next? My vote is that the Roman Catholics should be in the governments sights. After all, having all of those resources consuming children mustn’t be allowed in our Brave New Britain.
July 31, 2008
Merchants of Death
The House of Lords has ruled that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) acted lawfully when it halted its investigation into a Saudi arms deal.
The SFO dropped its inquiry into the £43bn deal with BAE Systems over fears it would threaten national security. Ministers said that the Saudi government had threatened to withdraw cooperation on security matters. The High Court had ruled in April that this was unlawful, but the Law Lords have reversed that decision on appeal.
So BAE cut a few Saudis some rather large Gregorys in order to secure a large arms contract … & the problem with that is what exactly??
I seem to recall reading a story about some proposals for arms manufacturers to sign up to an ethical sales policy – the naivety of which I find absolutely astonishing. May be frothing at the mouth liberals also want the hated merchants of death to ensure that there products are sustainable & capable of re-cycling as well? I on the hand can only applaud the actions of British Aerospace in adopting local business practises in order to make money i.e. deliver shareholder value.
In these difficult times, it makes a refreshing change to see a major UK company taking a pragmatic stance in the face of all of the corporate social responsibility tripe that is banded around these days & showing concern for their shareholders dividends.
This is why my unethical share portfolio trades so well. Forget buying stock in companies that make sandals out of old tyres & have a fairtrade policy – companies like that will always be more concerned with their image than protecting your investment in them. Go out & buy oil majors, armscos, anybody that manufactures booze or fags & I guarantee you that you will "beat the index"
July 30, 2008
Cromwell
While preparing yesterdays little piece on African Infantrymen of the Year & looking the ARRSE thread where the pics were originally published, I read the various comments that people had posted. One commenter had the following strap line on this profile which resonates even louder today than when Oliver Cromwell used these words to dismiss the Rump Parliament in April 1653…
Come come!. We have had enough of this. I will put an end to your prating. It is not fit that you should sit here any longer! You have sat here too long here for any good you have been doing lately. You shall give this place to better men! Call them in! Call them in! (the musketeers). You call yourselves a Parliament. You are no Parliament; I say you are no Parliament! You are whoremasters and drunkards, corrupt and unjust men, how can you be a Parliament for God’s People? Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
What price Cromwell today dear readers?
July 23, 2008
New financial products
Forget the fact that it isn't just that your house is now worthless but you have negative equity
in the light of the sub prime, the credit crunch & ensuing confidence crisis, a free market will always do what it does best ... i.e. come up with new & even more complex financial products
Investment dealers are excited to announce the newest structured finance product - Constant Obligation Leveraged Originated STructured Oscillating MoneY Bridged Asset GuaranteeS, or... COLOSTOMY BAGS.
Designed to accommodate the most sophisticated investment strategies, Colostomy Bags contain the equity tranches of Structured High Interest Taxable Derivatives, or SH 1T, and are leveraged an infinite amount of times through the innovative use of derivatives.
'Its an actively managed, unlimited liability, open ended investment with no maturity date, which pays LIBOR plus 5,000 and has no correlation to traditional investments' said a spokesman for the Investment Dealer who engineered the product. 'It's based on a CDO structure, but it's designed to default BEFORE the first coupon payment, which you'll agree has no correlation with stodgy traditional investments and is a perfect fit for portable alpha strategies'. Following the default, each month more leverage is added to the structure to pay for the coupon and the Dealer's fees which are set at 80%. 'We feel the fees are reasonable, given the adrenaline rush you'll get each month attempting to mark these'.
The Colostomy Bags carry a AAAA rating, based on the rating agencies opinion that they are even safer than Treasuries. 'You can't use traditional credit analysis to value these babies, no sir-ree', said a spokesman for a rating agency. 'Just like Icelandic Banks, we give them the highest rating because you just know that the Fed will bail out all the hedgies who buy these things. And the best part is, the beauty of this structure is that the loss given default is NEGATIVE, so by extension we feel that the CDS will trade through Treasuries'. Inhaling deeply on a fatty, he continued, 'We've been tinkering with our model, which served us well for Enron and the Telecoms in '02, and our stress testing shows that the probability of loss in the senior tranche is close to zero'.
A real money investor, huddled high-up on a windowsill outside his office, said he remained optimistic about holding the Colostomy Bags, but was a bit concerned with the 95% decline in value on the first day they traded. 'We've taken a bit of a haircut on these but I'm waiting to see the first servicer report, which should arrive in a few months. At first I was annoyed that the dealer who sold them to me refused to make a market in them, but that makes my job easier since I'm not tempted to sell'.
We located a hedge fund manager at a due diligence meeting in the VIP room at Score's. He said he was skeptical of the structure at first, but was dared into buying it by a fixed income salesman. "He said to me, 'what's wrong with you, its quadruple A-rated, just buy it, what are you a pu ssy?' He also said it was going into 'an index' (although he didn't say which one). But that was good enough for me, bro, as most our funds belong to clients anyway'.
An assignment of my open long dated CDO positions the reader (who works for an investment bank) who sent me this
July 21, 2008
Public sector sick note culture
According to the latest figures available from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development, private sector workers take on average 7.2 days off sick each year. This compares with public sector workers who take off on average 9.8 days sick each year.
Whilst the difference might not sound a lot (2.6 days) in percentage terms, it equates to a whooping 36.1%. I leave it to you dear readers, to draw your own conclusions
July 18, 2008
"Hideously white"
Some of Britain’s most popular television programmes including the Vicar of Dibley and Who Wants to be a Millionaire have been criticised for being “too white” in a report led by Trevor Phillips, the equality chief.
Well of course they are Trev & there's a klansman around every corner as well !
Mr Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that all the evidence showed that television was still “hideously white where it matters”, a reference to those in senior roles.
An interesting sentence construction there ... "hideously white" ... says it all really. Of course shows like The Vicar of Dibley have a hideous white cast, because rural Britain is predominantly hideously white.
To keep the likes of Trev happy, maybe programmes like The X Factor could be replaced by a new show - The Malcolm X Factor. Quite why this is necessary, I don't know because there are already shows that seem to have casts drawn exclusively from modern Britain's racially diverse society ... take Crimewatch for example
July 16, 2008
Golden balls
A few weeks ago, your humble correspondent was at what I believe is known as a trade conference. On the whole it was unremarkable save for one of the key note speakers, who is the CEO of one of Hong Kong’s largest companys. When he was asked about the dangers of inflationary pressures that are building up in the economy, he replied that they were a good thing because that meant that he could put his prices up!
Indedd, when questioned further about the impact of inflation on the poor, he did reluctantly admit that inflation would hurt them but went on to conclude that they weren’t his customers in the first place so it didn't matter. At this point I left the auditorium vowing to spend the next two days in the bar ... because at least some sense might get talked in there.
Sometimes & do trust me on this, Chinese businessmen just aren’t as smart as they are made out to be. Take for example Lam Sai-wing who is head of Hang Fung Gold Technology & is the proud owner of a famous golden lavatory
reading Long or Short Capital last night, they use his recent interview in the WSJ to illustrate a lil bit of HK corporate speak…
Corporate speak:
Building a gold toilet, I realized…would be like an investment, plus we could let people see it for an admission fee, and we could use it to launch our brand. [Besides gold prices were so low they could only go up; buying gold at $200 an ounce would hedge against inflation] -Lam Sai-wing
Translation:
This was the perfect way for me to stoke my ego plus it was a sizable risky speculation in a commodity which, as a retail jewelry business, is not what we should be doing — another reason it was a great idea! I knew that if gold went up, I would look like a genius and likely get a nod from the Wall Street Journal who eats up these zany stories; if gold went down or stayed the same, I would look like the guy with the crazy big ego but I’d still be rocking a gilded room. A classic win-win situation for me, win-lose for the shareholders. It’s all in the game.
Corporate speak:
The toilet and the Guan Yin statue are the most valuable pieces[.] As for the toilet, that’s the cornerstone of our company[.] It’s an icon. It will never be taken apart. -Lam Sai-wing
Translation:
As for the toilet, that’s my throne. It will be taken apart if the price is right.
July 8, 2008
Two hundred years on
I was going to post this yesterday but it got lost somewhere in the kafuffle of travel arrangements that completely consumed the afternoon. However, being a great believer in better late than never, here is a little fact for you…
in 1808 as the Napoleonic War raged, Great Britain’s total government spending for the year was £36,000,000
To put that number into perspective (& to take account of inflation) the figure represents £2.304 billion today. 200 years on where is the HMG’s total spending today…
£10 billion?
£50 billion?
£100 billion?
No dear readers, this year the Westminster Village will spend a little over £600 billion of our money.
To look at this topic the other way around, £600 billion today would represent £9.375 billion in 1808. With that sort of money in your sky rocket there wouldn’t have been a Napoleonic War … we could have simply bought Europe for cash & thereby ensured not only a lot on the unpleasantness of the last 200 years was avoided & that ultimately, everybody drove on the correct side of the road.
So in 1808, the government ran the country & fought a high intensity conflict all for a couple of ‘bill’ & change. Now I absolutely accept that over the last 200 years, governments have lots more things that that have to spend money on, but here’s the thing, in 1808 they ran the country & defeated European integration, all for significantly less money that the £4 billion p.a. that the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation alone, exhorts from the public.
It’s probably not just me that thinks that our forefathers were a lot more prudent with the public purse than our current crop of politicians. Indeed if our political class were in fact a ‘crop’, the amount of subsidy that it seems to need to sustain it should make even the most profligate of Brussels plutocrats proud.
June 12, 2008
42 days later
So lets be clear on this, the police can now hold terrorism suspects without charge for 42 days. Isn’t it just amazing what you can force through the House of Commons if you dole out enough pork!
Now I for one have absolutely no problem with hunting down any terrorist, wherever they may be & whoever they may be. But we are now required to trust the civil servants, police & the security services to make judgement calls on holding suspects without charge for a month & a half.
& these are the same said individuals that cant even manage their own filing??
June 9, 2008
"Bank set to name Bean as deputy"
As we stare into abyss of a global recession, why am I not even surprised when I read this…
June 6, 2008
Of financial evolution
Police have clashed with hundreds of bankers protesting against the high cost of finance outside the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels.
Several bottles of ‘Bolly’ were broken & protestors burned copies of the Financial Times Companies & Markets section. However the largely peaceful but vocal protests turned nasty when members of Goldman Sach’s M&A department tried to storm the Commission building
Riot police responded by switching off the 3G/GPRS network in the area thereby disabling protestors Blackberries.
The bankers have said they will go out of business unless the EU allows national governments to give them more financial aid and subsidise their dirivative trading activities.
Some investors withdrew from the primary markets several months ago over the current cost of funds & the reluctance of lending institutions to allow extremely high levels of leverage on senior debt positions. LIBOR & EUROBOR rates have risen significantly in recent months.
By late afternoon traffic in the city centre had been all but brought to a standstill by a blockade of major routes by Lehman’s Corporate Advisory Team
In recent days protestors have been joined by structured financiers well as employees of many Mezz houses from the UK, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
This would of course be as absurd as for example a Government saying that it can hold anyone it likes for 42 days without charge. Over the last few months the arbitrage between yields & cost of funds has evaporated & there is no point crying into your Moet about it. We are at the end of a good 10 year run & now the market has changed. Either deal with it & find a different way of making money or go out of business. The market in its widest sense & nature are remarkably similar in that respect: evolve or die.
In exactly the same way, it is patently absurd for European fishermen to be demanding higher fuel subsidies from the taxpayer in response to raising fuel costs. Either charge more for your product because your unit cost has increased, or change your business model because the market has moved on. If you are not prepared to do either of these then you had better start scanning the situations vacant section of the newspaper.
I am never one to habour a grudge, but French fishermen especially deserve all that is coming to them. Part of the danegelt that was demanded for Great Britain as our entry ticket to the then EEC was essentially the simultaneous destruction of our deep sea fishing industry & our fish stocks by continental fleets. If their job description going forward involves asking Voulez-vous des frites avec cela I for one wont be crying into my Moet.
June 5, 2008
Iran: its time to spread the love
No wise nation would be interested in making a nuclear weapon today. They are against rational thought
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
& that’s the whole crux of the whole nuclear Iran debate isn’t it? Iran is many many things, but a rational country led by ‘statesmen’ it certainly is not – how about something along the lines of globally one of the largest net exporters of terrorism? Is that closer to the mark? Even the those serial appeasers of dictators at the United Nations have grave concerns about the direction of Iran’s (ahem) nuclear power programme, you don’t just smell a rat so much as you know that the Pied Piper could be kept busy until he reached retirement.
& the EU’s response is what exactly?
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana is planning to travel to Tehran soon to submit a new package of incentives for Iran to stop its most sensitive nuclear work.
Ah, more appeasement? Well that’s really likely to work. In fact when you hear US presidential candidates talk about wanting to sit down & ‘engage’ with these lunatics you really have to start to think that maybe the allegations of foreign policy inexperience might just have a grain of truth about them.
& the answer to this seemly intractable problem … at the risk of sounding like a management consultant; outsource it. Give the Israelis whatever additional capability that they require & let them go & spread the love.
Rightly or wrongly, Israeli might be in breech of a zillion UN resolutions (incidentally, many of which are of very questionable motivation) but over the last couple of decades, they have taken more practical measures to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons than any other nation & certainly have proved to be more effective in this than any meaningless pieces of paper.
That ghastly woman
Have we really seen the back of her? Really? Promise?
Or is it time for the conspiracy claims to be thrown around? …. Oophs sorry, inevitably that has started already.
May 30, 2008
& the French are revolting (again)
So here we have a picture of French fishermen committing criminal damage & theft, handing out frozen fish to the public in protest to high fuel prices
& where exactly are the police in all of this?? No doubt having lunch somewhere & desperately trying not to get involved. What price the Rule of Law eh?
Needless to say, Darth Sarko’s government that promised to stand up to the unions & introduce market reforms has been predictably swift in its capitulation in the face of rising fuel costs with the offer of more taxpayer handouts…
President Nicolas Sarkozy's government last week announced 100 million euros (173 million dollars) in immediate aid for the fishermen
As if we needed it, here is Reason No.53,619 to get the hell out of the European Union: every time the macro-economic environment is less than benign, governments capitulate to the hysterical demands of the socialist trades unions.
Our policy to the ‘continent’ should clear, consistent & unequivocal - we go there to observe, to trade (on our terms) and occasionally fight the French & Germans.
May 27, 2008
Little Miss Moffat
My erstwhile host in Texas recommends that whenever striking up a conversation with a member of the Pictish nation, you should politely invite your counterparty to
Punch me now Jock & get it over with
because you just know that it is going to happen sooner of later. Indeed the social morels north of 'the wall' do seem to dictate that an evening out should involve, at the very least, a few casual heeeeedbutts (aka the Glasgow kiss) or the gratuitous use of a broken beer bottle.
Now in no way do I countenance violence against women in any of its many disgusting forms but when I read that
Police have launched an investigation after Labour MP Anne Moffat was attacked, BBC Scotland has learned. Ms Moffat said she was mugged by a gang of drunken youths and left with broken ribs while jogging near her home, in Cockenzie, East Lothian. The East Lothian MP was knocked unconscious and her watch and jewellery taken by her attackers
I cannot help but conclude that Hadrian was right all along.
However this post doesn’t intend to question why little Miz Moffat was wearing jewellery while out jogging … clearly her concept of physical exercise & mine, are markedly different. Where your humble correspondent would like to go with this post is to cast a jaundiced & bloodshot eye over her response to these events.
Now I know that many of you, upon hearing the news of this attack, will have a similar reaction to mine, which runs along the lines of why on earth haven’t more of our perfidious MPs been bludgeoned unconscious & how can we ensure that this occurs more regularly in the future. But it is Miz Moffat’s reaction that I find both interesting & distressing on two separate but connected levels.
Firstly, her statement that
These people are just scum
Of course, it is very rare to find such candour from our political class. However, I would have thought that calling anyone scum these days breaks about 25 pieces of anti-incitement legislation. Surely these people aren't scum, they are just disadvantaged?
I have no doubt that if your humble correspondent were to refer to anyone as scum public, I’d be on the receiving end of the six o’clock knock & the bracelets would be well & truly. If fact, these days even referring to anyone as Jock or Taffy probably constitutes racial harassment. Calling someone scum whether they are or not is an open invitation to the Crown Prosecution Service to try & pin one on you However in ZANU-Labour’s Britain, some are more equal than others.
Secondly & even more crucially, is Miz Moffat’s assertion that
Its made me more aware of what it's like to be a victim
Ah, the socialists holy of holies … she has ascended to the most hallowed of deities … that of victimhood. Note that she isn’t going to figure out how to ensure that this never happens again. She isn’t going to work out how to defend herself in future. She isn’t going to take any responsibility for herself or her actions: quite the reverse in fact, because she is now a VICTIM*.
To my mind, anyone that thinks of themselves as a victim deserves all that is coming to them.
Victim: (noun) a burden on others, a burden on the taxpayer
May 26, 2008
Your start the week quickies
The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’
Larry Hardiman & stolen from The England Project & this from the Religion of Peace
Two things happened in Iraq last week. A US soldier shot a discarded copy of the Qur’an, and al-Qaeda strapped explosives to an 8-year-old girl, killing more Iraqis in the name of Allah. Only one of these acts enraged Muslims. Do you know Islam well enough to know which?
Lawyers & social security scroungers
Of course, we were all uplifted to the Nu Labour take a complete & utter drubbing in the Crewe by-election if for no other reason that it heralded the start of a long line of government ministers all try to explain that the electorate as sending a “clear message”.
The clear message isn’t that we want government policies to change, it is that want the entire government not just to be collectively killed but hideously mutilated in some freak traffic accident. That way we can simply dig a pit, pour in body parts, gore, a few gallons of unleaded & then toss the match & try & forget about how ghastly the last eleven years have been. Sadly this is only a dream as accordingly to the Laws of Cumulative Probability it is unlikely that we can hope for the entire Parliamentary Labour Party to be wiped out in a single