Crock of Brown

I'm not going to say too much on this, and I try and avoid using this blog to rant, but Gordon Brown is really taking the piss over this expenses debacle.

'Gentlemen's Club'? Oh, fine, play your little class-war game. It's nothing like a gentlemen's club, because guess what? They contain gentlemen, who behave as such and seek not to exploit the club and are generally more concerned with fair play and the spirit of the rules rather than their letter. What you're thinking of, Gordon, is a Trade Union, where people seek to get as much as they possibly can at the expense of other areas of the business, and are generally advised to take whatever they can get.

No wonder Michael Martin was so comfortable there.

The only leader who sounds out of touch on this issue is you, Gordon, because you're playing class and party politics. At least Nick and Dave are playing moral politics. You wouldn't have the first clue about those, since your Moral Compass seems to do nothing but spin.

Go to hell, you sanctimonious, misguided, arrogant, fool. Get out of Downing Street before we throw you out.

Maybe it's a sign of the times, but every time you open your mouth I can see his poorly concealed Machiavellian plots to weaken his internal rivals and strengthen his position. I even feel a little guilty calling them Machiavellian, since I think the author of The Prince would approve of his intention but be appalled at his execution. Divide and conquer, sow discord and fear...

Anyway, crowbarring back onto track, an external committee or regulator is not the answer. External regulation destroys the concept of the spirit of the rules, making it all the more about 'what can I get away with'. Creative accounting will become even more the norm, just as it does with tax. Any private businessman with a few beans to his name uses an accountant to maximise his earnings and get away with as much as he feasibly can. Do you really want to encourage that in Parliament?

Of course you do. It makes it look like you're taking action.

Primus inter podex.

Okay, rant over.

Aporkalypse Now

Dr John Crippen has an article in todays Grauniad. It is one of those rare occasions that the publication speaks sense (this is, after all, the newspaper who gave us such delights as Polly Toynbee and ran a campaign against legitimate tax avoidance whilst simultaneously legitimately avoiding said tax itself).

Essentially, he puts this swine-flu pandemic in withering perspective with this:

"We met at lunchtime, not to talk of heart attacks and Lego, but of flu. There have been deaths in Mexico. There has been one in the US. Our Indian partner said: "There were 2,000 deaths, mainly children in Africa and Asia, yesterday."

Our medical student looked shocked: "I didn't know swine flu had reached that part of the world." "It hasn't," said our partner. "I'm talking of deaths from malaria. But that isn't news, is it?"

We were silent for a while. Time to get things in proportion."

For all the black humour doing the rounds (and highly amusing references to Pooh and Piglet), the aporkalypse is not going to kill us all any more than Avian flu did. As Dr Crippen rightly points out, there are many, many more deaths every day from far nastier diseases, but the western world is protected against malaria. We don't get it here in Britain. Why should we care?

As cynical as my views are on Comic Relief and the pantheon of Entertainment Fundraisers, this year an good amount of time was spent discussing Malaria. So for one night only, we cared enough to donate more money than we ever had before, hurrah, because every year we do. And then it was forgotten. Noses off, a few pub discussions about those hilarious sketches, but were we talking about malaria? Or AIDS? No, of course not.

We might catch the flu though, and what then? I've read the advice I received in my office from the Department of Health. It tells me nothing I didn't already know about normal flu. At risk groups are the young and the elderly, and it's the secondary infections that will put people at most risk. You are at greater risk of catching it than you would be of normal influenza, but death is not the only possible outcome. In fact, if you treat swine flu the same way you would treat a little old lady with 'normal' flu, guess what! You'll be fine. I do not wish to belittle the Mexicans who have died, nor the Texan child. Loss of life is tragic, especially in the young, but your memories are being abused by the political classes.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at all the fuss. The media exists to sell the news, and big stories make big sales. Governments can use their 'initiatives' to combat it to distract from the real, day-to-day issues that actually matter. Brown and The Golden One must be basking in their relief, a crisis they can use to show themselves caring men of action.

Enough. Do what you need to do, send some of our Tamiflu stockpiles to Mexico if you must - goodness knows their medical standards almost make the NHS look bearable - but please drop the pretense that you are somehow acting to protect us from this hamdemic.

Leave it out

Just for the record.

She is not Princess Diana. She did no great charitable works. Even if she did, I wouldn’t get it. Her story is no more tragic than the soldiers who died fighting for us in Afghanistan; actually, it’s less tragic. Three mothers lost their sons on Mother’s day, and we devote a whole host of column inches to a woman who made her money from being a bit thick on the television.

Why is it sad? Because a young woman died, leaving behind a family. Oh, but guess what, it happens all over the world, every day. People die young, long before their time. She doesn’t matter any more, or less, than they do.

If anything, we see the hypocrisy of the media circus, who damned her, loved her, damned her then loved her as soon as they heard she was going to shuffle off this mortal coil. Give over, please, and get some perspective.

The politicians chiming in should be ashamed for using this as a nice vehicle for showing they are connected with the people. Were you personal friends? No. Then you have nothing to say. Any Doctor will tell you a smear test on a late teen or early twentysomething is more likely to give a false positive than a definitive, so don’t go punting that line.

When Diana died, in the media storm that followed we almost missed the deaths of Mother Theresa and Sir George Solti. I dread to think what we will be distracted from now.

Her death is tragic, but it is a tragedy for her family. Just try and remember what you thought of her before you knew she was dying – be it good or ill – and don’t kid yourself.

No obligation for Fred to shred

Some people seem to think it’s disgraceful, others obscene, but Sir Fred Goodwin has no intention of surrendering any part of his £693,000-a-year pension, despite requests from Brown, Badger-Brows and Lord Myners to do so. Nor should he. The Government has no right to interfere in pensions, and even less in the Rule of Law.

Sir Fred has become something of a focus for the public ire, a figure to vilify who is an exemplar of all that was wrong with the banking industry – it has earned him the unenviable soubriquet of ‘the world’s worst banker’. His purchase of ABN-Amro has been viewed as a reckless business decision, one that left RBS overexposed to the market crash; it was always a high-risk strategy, but it was not reckless. The rewards were potentially high, and had the collapse in the sub-prime market not destroyed confidence in the sector, triggering the crash and freeze on the credit markets, I suspect he would still be viewed as one of the best. After all, he pulled it off beautifully when RBS bought over Natwest. This was not necessarily the wrong purchase, but it was the wrong time.

His aggressive strategy left the company exposed at a critical moment and he must live with the shame of that legacy. He built RBS into a juggernaut, a banking colossus, only to over-extend his reach – but remember the profits the group made under his leadership. That is where he earned his pension. Yes, the salaries of the top brass were ‘obscene’, but so too was the amount of money their companies were making.

Quite aside from the fact that pensions are deferred payment (therefore we must consider his entire career, not simply his error in judgement towards the end), it is wrong for the Government to demand that he surrenders his pension. Legally, it would set a dangerous precedent were they to attempt to force him to. It would be remarkably short-sighted of them to do so, and if Sir Fred must forgo his due, should not also the Government ministers who oversaw this fiasco? The leaders of the FSA who failed to regulate? Where would it stop?

RBS is still a private limited company. The Government is a major shareholder, but it has not been fully nationalised. He is contractually entitled to it, and we now know from Sir Fred’s response that the Government had agreed to this award when it was confirmed in November last year. Their response is a political one, and it reflects poorly on them – the worst kind of Daily Mail politics. Brown, Darling & Co are merely attempting to cover their backsides and hide their incompetence.

Gordon has a damned cheek to talk about pensions, given his raid on the national pension and destruction of the Final Salary pension in the public sector. Glass bloody houses indeed, to accuse Sir Fred now.

Now, I think it would be fair to say that the contract is not a good one. It has allowed for a man who built and destroyed a bank, who presided over a policy of high-risk investments and ultimately failed his shareholders to be rewarded with a very generous pension. It is still a contract, as Tim Worstall puts it so concisely:

“Pensions are deferred compensation. This is part of the contract that he signed all those years ago.

It may not have been a very good contract, it might be that we or you or even they wish it had not been signed in the form it was, but it is indeed a contract.

And tearing up contracts, abandoning the rule of law, is really not an action or activity that is going to help us in the future.”

Someone posted a comment to Iain Dale’s blog entry yesterday containing an exchange between Sir Thomas More and William Roper, an exchange that encapsulates this affair. It explains precisely why the Government should tread carefully here:

“William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

I think that says it all, don’t you?

There are times for a dignified silence

You would have thought Jacqui Smith would be a little bit too busy preparing her excuses - sorry, reasons - for her expenses fiddle, but yesterday she still found time to comment on Professor Nutt's comments that ecstasy was no more dangerous than an addiction to equestrianism.

Now, far be it from me to make a scientific comment, but having had the numbers of deaths caused by ecstasy rammed down my throat (what was it, 30 last year?), compared to deaths involving horses (ah, wait, something like 100, yes?), I wonder if he might have a point.

Unity has made this point before over on the Ministry of Truth. The Drugs policy in this country is a shambles, despite all the evidence suggesting that prohibition doesn't work, the government continues to pursue it. I think most people fail to realise is that doctors prescribe drugs daily which have side-effects and can be fatal or damaging if taken in large doses. Paracetamol is available over the counter, for heaven's sake, knock back enough of them and you'll be getting your stomach pumped in no short order.

Would regulation and legalisation allow for the purity of a substance to be defined? Probably, yes. Would that make it safer? Undoubtedly. A big problem for heroin users, for example, is when the quality changes and suddenly they've taken twice as much as they're expecting. Make it legal and you can bloody tax it. Since cigarettes and alcohol are already such an earner, why not diversify?

So, I have to ask, why are drugs like tobacco and alcohol legal, substances such as oxycodone and diazepam available on prescription, yet a drug that literally does as it says on the tin - ecstasy - is illegal? The argument that it is dangerous doesn't hold any water, and when new studies keep suggesting that it is no more dangerous than alcohol (which is proven to cause long-term damage, unlike ecstasy), you start to wonder why the establishment is so keen to ban it. Don't they like people having a good time? When people have died, it's been as a result of dehydration or in some instances over-hydration. Most happy clubbers I've seen are smart enough to have a bottle of water in hand.

In the case of disco biscuits, the same counter-argument as for marajuana applies - we don't know the long-term implication because it hasn't been around for that long. Well, newsflash, we prescribe drugs daily where we *do* know there are long-term risks, some are pretty serious, yet we prescribe them anyway.

Fact is (oh, how I hate myself for saying that), there is a huge culture of drug-taking in Britain. There are kids out at the weekend on coke, speed, ecstasy, ketamine, a good few cooking up GHB (which *is* filthy fucking stuff), and there are a lot of them. I wouldn't even dare to put a finger in the wind guess on the real numbers, but how many of the clubbers at Fire in London do you think aren't on something? Ever been to The Arches in Glasgow on a Saturday night? And how many deaths are we hearing of every week?

Just because it wouldn't be a drugs-prohibition-related-rant without at least a mention of Holland. Hash legal. Are there hundreds of stoned Dutchmen on the streets? Err... no, actually. Plenty of stoned Brits over for the weekend, but it's pretty harmless. Back over this side of the stream, as Unity pointed out in his article, the police actually quite like (relatively speaking) dealing with people on pills, as for the most part they're too loved up with the world to be any hassle. It's the drunk ones that cause the issue.

Trying to crowbar myself back on track here, there was something Freebee Smith spewed in her denunciation of Professor Nutt that just irritated me:

"For me that makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs."

Seriously. She erodes her own moral authority and thinks she can take the high ground? The serious problem in her eyes is that people take drugs. The serious problem as I see it is that we spend so much time telling people what not to do that we don't think that maybe, just maybe, the majority of people are smart enough to make their own decisions. It's just like tobacco, or the codeine your doctor is prescribing you. If you know the risks you can make an informed decision.

At the end it all boils down to one question. Why do people take drugs? To enhance the way they feel. But you don't like people feeling good, do you, Jacqui.

Educate and inform, don't command and control. Let us choose for ourselves.

Bit of an oversight. Or not...

Okay, so I know the splash on Clarkson's hilarious comment was at the tail of last week, but I do feel it is worth saying that I entirely agree with the sentiment.

He is after all: a) one eye'd, b) Scottish and c) an idiot.

Is it used to dig from the ground? Yes, you say? Then it is a spade.

His apology is understandable in the sense that perhaps mentioning the 'one eye'd' part in the same phrase as idiot could offend everyone else with a visual impairment (to be fair, more by association with Jonah than anything else), but he is very definitely Scottish. Jeremy, may I just offer that not all Scots were offended. We're embarrassed by him too.

Lord Foulkes reaction did amuse me greatly:

“Something should be done about Clarkson.

“He has insulted Gordon Brown three times over — accusing him of being a liar, having a go at him for having a physical handicap, and for his nationality.”

Clarkson didn't take the piss out of our premier for his disability or nationality. You would only be offended by those things if you thought that somehow those made you less of a person. Given Foulkes' history, I think he might perhaps want to engage brain before mouth; he who is without sin, and all that...

Added Bonus

It was probably inevitable. Actually, it was inevitable. I've been waiting for it to happen, and I've not been disappointed. Northern Wreck were first in the firing line, and now the other banks are following suit and announcing this year's bonus payments for staff.

Since the collapse of the sub-prime market triggered, or contributed, to the worldwide recession we are now sliding deeper into, Politicians who should know better have taken easy potshots at overpaid bankers and their obscenely generous bonuses. It is this bonus culture that blinded them , in their greed, to the greater and more dangerous risks they were taking.

And maybe they're right, maybe the bonus award schemes that some of these high-flyers were on did encourage reckless behaviour. As such, perhaps the way these bonuses are constructed needs to be reviewed, but I think that perhaps it is a little rich of the Government - who sang the praises of our Financial Services industry - to condemn them so roundly.

The morning press seems to have split its attention between Jacqui Smith (who 'denies all wrongdoing' - journalist speak for 'guilty as sin') and her immoral (if maybe not illegal) expenses fiddle, and Brown taking a tough stance on bankers' bonuses. Yvette Cooper's performance on the Today Programme blunted what would otherwise have been a strong moral argument (not helped by Jacqboot's startlingly brazen abuse of public trust), on which Iain Dale has a few words to say.

In this instance, Cooper called for bankers to exercise their moral judgement and not accept their bonuses, even if contractually their employer was obliged to offer one. Perhaps a fair point, but who are these bankers? The once high-flying investment monkey, the one who 'caused' this mess (rememeber him?) and his massive six-figure-plus bonus, or the teller in the branch, with a much more modest bonus related to customer service and product sales?

Chances are, the tellers, Customer Advisers, Mortgage Advisers and so on and so forth, are on relatively modest wages as well - their bonus makes a big difference to them, and is a reward for good performance. Who is to say that these front-line staff don't deserve their bonus? They've worked hard, fulfilled their contractual obligations, and it's time for them to get their reward. Whether or not my taxes are propping up their business or not - and let me make this clear, the money that pays that bonus has nothing to do with the money from the Treasury, operational budgets will be covering those payments, not the capital liquidity provided to encourage lending.

Much more thorny are the executives who stood by, fingers in ears and eyes tight shut singing "La la la" and hoping that the disaster would never come and the good times would never end. Have they performed well? Have the investment monkeys who took the risks and rewards and drove us to the precipice performed well? Do they deserve their bonuses?

Here's where I agree with Cooper, but not wholly. I'm not sure it's fair to ask anyone to turn down their bonus if contractually, they were only doing what they were encouraged to do. If we look at their performance review and it turns out that whatever the consequences were or have been, they have ticked all the boxes for what they were supposed to do, it is manifestly unfair of us to then move the goalposts and say they shouldn't have it.

Instead, given the noise being created over this, I would suggest that the banks need to review their rewards schemes to ensure that bonus payments can reward high performance but not encourage irresponsible practice. This is one area I think the regulators should have been involved, not just in terms of how the banks operated, but how their pay and reward systems were structured.

It would be dangerous, though to tar everyone with the same brush. Most of the bonuses paid aren't for the fat cats - but they'll certainly see the largest slice. Just don't let that blind you to those who really do deserve it.

UPDATE - entry by Dr. Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute blog, makes my point but a lot more succinctly.

Smoke and mirrors. And Sat-Navs, nannies, mortgages...

Mr Eugenides has cross-posted on DK about a little smoke-and-mirrors at Westminster - namely, that the much awaited 'review' of MPs expenses, in a severely watered down format, was conveniently announced (without much ado) on the same day as the Heathrow runway debacle. John McDonnell's little performance served as a nice little headline grabber to draw attention to the fact that very little has changed.

The Times has the run-down here.

Independent has some independent thinking...

Two very good articles on the Indy website today - one pointing out the spinelessness of politicians in their response to 'pakigate', the other a witty submission to the credit crisis and delusion of Flash Gordon's economic policy. Worth a read.

PC Brigade Strikes Again

The sad thing about public life is that all it takes is for one little comment to be taken out of context, and before you know it, the PC Brigade are jumping all over you demanding an apology.

My comments somehow failed to make it on to the BBC website, but it looks like my opinion was mirrored by a good many others who made their voices heard.

On one hand, I can understand how an outsider might see Harry referring to a colleague as a 'paki' could be taken as racist, except that would mean by extention that calling him a 'brit' would also be offensive. I appreciate that the word has connotations, but who gave it that connotation? Isn't not using it perpetuating the negative connotation? I mean, the gay community reclaimed gay, why can't the pakistani community reclaim 'paki'?

In context, it was more than likely being used as a nickname - call a spade a spade, right? As for raghead... well our troops are being expected to go off and shoot Afghan terrorists and Iraqi insurgents. Shooting is fine, calling them names is not, clearly.

Now if Harry meant it offensively or was bullying the lad, then I could understand the issue, however, I don't believe that in this instance he was. It's another example of the PC brigade jumping on an opportunity to get wound up over nothing and for the media to whip up a little frenzy.

Get. Over. It... and leave the poor lad alone.

A matter of distance...

It looks like Harriet Harman can see the writing on the wall. She clumsily avoided giving any vote of support for the Speaker, Michael Martin, whose failure to stand up to police (who entered without a warrant) was compounded by a weak statement at the opening of parliament yesterday. This should hardly surprise us, after all, he lets Brown and NuLab get away with murder in the commons.

Interestingly, the focus seems to be moving away from Jacqui and Gordon. Their apparent ignorance of the plans of the Counter-Terrorist police to arrest Damian Green suggests that they are either incompetent, or liars.

Surely not?

Back to the Speaker for a moment, the Times makes a good point about the actual rights of MPs, but you might have thought that it was his duty to ask Police whether they posessed a warrant, and at least satisfy himself that their response was in proportion to the alleged offence.

The real issue at stake here is why the police suddenly felt this particular mole and MP were worth going after, and why the response was so heavy-handed. After all, Gordon Brown made boasts about his leaks for years, perhaps the Met might like to chase down some of these politicians as well?