Category: National politics

This lunchtime Radio 4’s World at One show is leading on Baroness Scotland’s £5,000 fine for breaking the law she pushed through Parliament which demands that employers both check and copy their employees documents so that they can ensure that they are not employing illegal immigrants, see BBC story here.

Over the weekend the Sunday Times reported that Scotland has also been abusing the House of Lords expenses system to pilfer £170,000 from tax payers. Although she has lived for some time in Chiswick she makes out that she needs overnight allowances. The BBC isn’t using this story so either it does not stand up or they are colluding in keeping the heat off Scotland.

One of Scotland’s Labour predecessors as Attorney General was the notorious Hartley Shawcross of “we are the masters now” fame. Not for long you are not.

If you want some evidence of how far Labour has corrupted our civil service you only have to see this list of milestones produced by the Government Equalities Office. Apparently it records the milestones along the long road of progress towards equality for women.

The truly glaring omission is that our modern civil service is not allowed to name Margaret Thatcher, our first woman prime minister. You can imagine the exchange at the GEO when a lowly functionary presented the list to the Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC MP, Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, Minister for Women, and Cabinet Minister for Equality.

Civil Servant: Are you happy with the list Minister?

Harriet Harman: Yes, I know it is hard to ignore the fact that we elected our first woman prime minister in 1979 but couldn’t we just not use her actual name?

Civil Servant: Yes, Minister.

You can understand that after 12 years in power that the civil service can’t help but genuflect in the face of Labour minister’s prejudices. But, in their desire to demonstrate progress on equality under New Labour the compilers of this list have forgotten to acknowledge another Margaret, Labour hero Margaret Bondfield, this country’s first woman cabinet minister. I guess a date back in 1929 does not fit the New Labour narrative so Bondfield gets airbrushed out too. You might think that Harman would remember her sister but maybe she hasn’t got much time for working class Christians.

The list gives us 27 milestones of which 12 (one a year) happened under New Labour. Right. Apparently the appointment of the thieving Baroness Uddin was some kind of advancement for women. The last three are anniversaries (arbitrarily 100th, 90th and 80th) which hilariously distort the list.

In GEO’s own words:

GEO is a small policy Department employing just over 100 staff (excluding our legal advisers based in HM Treasury Solicitor’s Department).

That is about 100 too many in my book I have to say. If you look at their accounts the 103 idiots employed by GEO last year cost us £70 million.

According to the FT today:

The shadow chancellor also pledged to set out plans before the election for a cull of civil servants on a scale that would “pleasantly surprise” taxpayers.

Culling the GEO wholesale would pleasantly surprise me.

The big financial news of the evening is that the FTSE 100 index has pushed through the psychologically important 5,000 barrier today. Great.

The FT says:

The gains took London’s blue-chip index to a close of 5,004.3, a gain of 1.15 per cent on the day, and 42.5 per cent above its low of six months ago. The last time the FTSE 100 closed above 5,000 was September 2008, when financial markets were in the grip of a steep sell-off following the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Excuse me if I don’t get too excited. If you look back a bit in time you will see how the Tories made us rich and Labour have made us poor.

Under the Tories £100 invested in the FTSE in 1984 would have been worth about £500 in 1997 when Labour was elected. After two Labour slumps equities are back where they were 12 years ago when Labour took over. Wow! Go away Labour!

I was not impressed with Hugh Orde’s performance on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday. Although he is a man of impressive achievements, not to mention a knight and OBE, in his role as shop steward for the police chiefs’ union he was drawing a false dividing line between accountability to politicians and operational control.

In last night’s Evening Standard Andrew Jenkins said pretty much all I would want to say about this issue. He is well worth reading:

The old line that politicians set policy and leave “operational matters” to the police is a worn cliché that can hardly stand the light of day. In the case of the Met it has come to mean politicians should give us the money and shut up.

No properly free society allows its police to operate as an elite corps detached from the political process.

The only thing I would disagree with Jenkins on is his denigrating of “community support officers paid for by borough rates” as “uninspiring”. Seeing our PCSOs out in all weathers around Ealing, typically energetic and motivated young people who want to get into the police, inspires me. On this issue Jenkins should literally get out more.

We don’t live in a police state. That is because you can chuck the rascals (politicians) out. It is not the police’s illusory operational independence that keeps us free, it is the ballot box. Police chiefs are just wrong on this one.

It was good to see David Cameron talking today about starting with Ministers, MPs and Parliament when it comes to restraining public expenditure next year when he becomes Prime Minister as I have no doubt he will. The BBC’s clip here has a good joke about LibDem eating habits.

You can read the whole speech here.

It looks like he might have taken some ideas from this blog. He talked about government cars and quoted the number of cars involved:

There are times when having a car to hand…

…which gets a minister to a certain place on time…

…is absolutely vital to our democratic process – for example, to make a vote in the House of Commons, or to meet a foreign dignitary or open a school.

But there is no need for 171 of these cars to be on hand for every government minister, whip – and indeed, myself.

You read it here first.

Cameron also talked about the cost of Parliament:

Last year, it cost £500 million to run Parliament.

That’s twice as much as it did in 1997.

And has it really got twice as good?

Again you read it here (well me but on ConservativeHome) first.

Cameron talks about taking 10% of Parliament’s costs out – I would go for 40%. But, all in all Cameron is going in the right direction. And pretty much following Boris Johnson’s advice of last week in the Telegraph.

Today Boris Johnson uses his column in the Telegraph to suggest that David Cameron can set the tone for his new government next summer by scrapping ministerial cars. Both Boris and Ken Livingstone before him have shown that you can do a job with ministerial status without the car. Quite right. Cameron’s government will be required to visit seven years of famine on our state and it needs to start with ministerial pay, pensions and perks and then get to work on Parliament and MPs if it is going to have the credibility required to do its job.

Back in February I showed how it would be possible to save £10 million by reducing the number of cars run by the Government Car Service from 170 to 50, see here.

You can pull all the numbers you need out of the Annual Report of the Government Car and Despatch Agency, here. Government mail and car services are handily structured as a Department of Transport Executive Agency and they publish separate figures.

In 2007/8 they had 171 cars and 168 drivers and they cost £14.0 million to run. That is about £82K per car but I guess they don’t have all the cars and the drivers on the road at the same time so they probably have nearer to 150 cars out there operating and the effective cost per car is slightly higher than £82K but probably not quite as much as £100K. They bought £1.0 million worth of new cars and employed five managers who earnt over £50K in 2007/8. All employees are on civil service pensions. Nice work if you can get it.

It sounds like you could keep 50 odd cars for the real big knobs, lose 120 or so and save £10 million. They also have large premises at 46 Ponton Road in Vauxhall which would probably make a nice capital receipt thank you.

Adair Turner, Chairman of the failed Financial Services Authority, clearly does not even partially understand the industry he is meant to be in charge of. The extent of his ignorance is just stunning.

His interview in Prospect magazine published today has been widely reported this afternoon, see BBC coverage here.

The idea that a Tobin tax could curtail the bonus culture in investment banking is just facile. There is a major structural problem with investment banking – if the market worked properly then excess profits and bonuses should be competed away. The fact that they are not is a real problem. Merely trying to tax these transactions does not change that situation. It could be argued that this would simply be a case of the state trying to take a share of these excess profits. Not very efficient I think.

The UK’s banking crisis has not really been an investment banking crisis. It has been a wholesale (or commercial) banking crisis. The major casualties were Northern Rock, HBoS/Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland. None of these had significant investment banking activity. Indeed Barclays, which was the one British bank with a significant if specialised investment banking arm, has had a good crisis comparatively speaking. Northern Rock overtraded on a duff business model. Bank of Scotland was bought low by massive criminality in its commercial lending operation.

Turner has clearly forgotten, if he ever knew, the modern history of wholesale banking in the City of London. It prospered in the seventies and eighties because the Eurodollar market allowed corporates to manage financial risks outside the onerous US regulatory environment.

It is all very well to point out that our financial sector is too large compared to the rest of our economy. The answer is not to hobble financial services but to take the brakes off the rest of the economy. A good place to start the process might be to look at lower corporation tax levels to persuade some other businesses to come home and reverse the current trend for businesses to move offshore.

Turner is one of those “high powered” management consultants who doesn’t really know anything. The sooner the Tories abolish the FSA and Turner the better.

The comments by David Norgrove, the UK’s pensions regulator, reported today by the BBC, are I suspect just the start of a massive debate. The credit crunch and Gordon Brown’s destructive stewardship of our economy are going to blight our national life and stunt our ambitions for at least a decade. Our pensions system, and more widely the attitude of our older people and society’s attitude to them in turn, will be a key factor in our wealth and happiness during this period.

Norgrove today points out that people like me are getting 6 hours of free additional life every day. The graph above, reproduced from National Statistics here, is stunning. It is a straight line. Nobody quite knows why the graph keeps going up, or when it will stop. Indeed, some scientists say that the first woman who will live for 1,000 years may already have been born.

The great question for our society, and the key to how wealthy we will be for decades to come, is how do we use these extra hours? Do we sit around collecting silver and assets? Do we buy 2017 gold eagle coins and dig a hole in the backyard to bury them for a rainy day? Do we sit around expecting our children and grandchildren to sub us or do we earn our keep? It is right that people should be given some years of retirement at the end of their lives. Even if you feel that this time is paid for by your own savings the economic fact is that you are supported in retirement by the industry of the young.

Our plans for changing people’s expectations of retirement are incredibly unambitious. Right now, pensionable age is 60 for women, 65 for men. That will rise to 66 in 2024, to 67 in 2034 and to 68 in 2044. For myself, at 47, I will be entitled to a state pension at 66. Norgrove suggests 70. My own father retired at 70 almost 20 years ago (during which time life expectancy from men increased 6 years). I fully expect, health allowing, to work until 75.

We need to move much faster to 70 being a normal retirement age with the possibility for people to work beyond that even and enhance their pension if they need to. We also will have to look at pushing the qualifying age for other benefits associated with old age out to 70 too. Our taxes will be much lower, our national debt will be much lower, our young people will be unburdened with supporting a rising elderly population, our older people will be enjoying additional years of happy, productive life. Our working lives need to lengthen, not our retirements. If you are looking for at home care for a loved one visit https://www.partnersforhome.ca/future-home-care-services-manitoba/.