Saturday 17 December 2011

Badgers & Farmers

What is it about badgers and farmers? Seriously, there are Hutus and Tutsis with less bad blood between them than our stripey, burrowing quadrupeds and our subsidy-chasing, Barbour-wearing bipeds. You have to wonder if there is some ghastly, traumatic incident behind the farmers' union's obsession with killing badgers - a long buried memory where the a young boy was repeatedly gang-tupped by boar badgers, a boy who grew up to become President of the NFU.

There really is no rational explanation for Caroline Spelman's decision to allow two test culls of badgers with the hope of limiting bovine TB, other than a desire to 'do something'. She might as well authorise beating squirrels to death with hammers in the hope that it might prevent another foot and mouth outbreak. Or why not electrocute a swan, see if that helps prevent bird flu. My only guess is that Spelman is trying to draw attention away from her 'let's sell off all those useless forests to the highest bidder' plan last year, by coming up with even more stupid and bovine concepts.

Cull me if you think you're hard enough!

The science, if you can call it that, goes like this. Badgers have TB, cows get TB, therefore the badgers give the cows TB, so if we kill all badgers, the cows won't have TB. Except they've tried this in Ireland to no great effect;  even the best case scenario suggest badger culls would only reduce bovine TB by 15%.

You might remember during the bird flu epidemic, swans and other wild birds were blamed for the contagion's spread. Then of course, it turned the real cuprit was dodgy practises in the intensive farming and meat processing trades. Psyschologists called this phenomenon projection, where you absolve your own feelings of guilt and shame by identifying those faults in others.

Ask yourself a simple question: which is more likely to be cause of chronic disease in British cattle? Is it badgers roaming in a small area or driving cows all over the UK for sale and then slaughter? Or indeed ask the broader question, is it in fact modern, intensive farming that causes disease in the first place?

The farmers could vaccinate their herds against TB, but it's expensive so they won't. Better to get the government to pay for a badger cull or as Bernard Matthews did, when you start an epidemic, get the taxpayer to pay the bill for damages.

The healthy countryside 
Peter Kendall, the President of the NFU, said it the pilot culls were  the first step towards 'a healthy countryside.' No, the first step would be the tackle the diseased modern farming methods. Indeed, we should not be taking lectures on health from an industry that fed ground-up pigs to chickens, fed infected blood to cows and has been responsible for three massive disease outbreaks in the last 30 years.

If the logic of the badger cull is that we should remove threats to British industry by whatever means necessary, the NFU ought to be in the crosshairs. No badger ever cost the nation billions through its own greed and foolishness.

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Royal Wind

It's a balmy November, as warm in London as a blazing Scottish summer i.e. not hot enough to require shorts or to break sweat, but unusually mild for the time of year.  The freak weather has triggered ducks to breed and Prince Philip to spout off about onshore wind turbines, calling them 'completely useless' and 'an absolute disgrace'. Another hilarious gaffe by our royal Alf Garnett; worth a chuckle but nought else.

Except that instead of simply adding to the Prince's wiki quotes, his outburst triggered no less than two articles in The Daily Telegraph and one in The Daily Mail, praising the Prince Consort for having the bravery to take on the 'warmist' lobby. A  'warmist' in the eyes of deniers of climate change is virtually every scientist on the planet, who agree that humanity is causing the planet to warm by doubling the atmospheric concentrations of C02.

Phil the Greek didn't present any information to support his claims, just simply a strongly held view that wind turbines were a bad thing. But that didn't stop three journalists in two days using it as an excuse to trot out a series of bizarre rants about how the evil BBC-socialist-green conspiracy is planning to turn the whole of Britain into a giant lesbian, vegetarian commune powered by wind-farms. If you think I'm exaggerating just read Melanie Philips' recent barrage of nonsense - a densely woven tapestry of ignorance, misinformation and misanthropy. On second thoughts, don't; life is too short.

The even weirder aspect of climate change is as the evidence grows stronger and more conclusive, the denial movement gains ground. So they leap on a Prince's statements as 'proof', but they don't actually say what it proves, other than the evil lefties are out to get you. That's the best advocate they could manage by the way: an elderly Royal. He joins an elite society of denialists: Christopher Booker, who also likes to claim that white asbestos is harmless, Lord Monckton, who apparently has a cure for AIDS, James Delingpole who writes every month on climate change but 'doesn't have the time to read the scientific papers' and Martin Durkin, a film-maker who prompted 178 respected scientists to complain to Ofcom over his C4 documentary on global warming, resulting in an upheld complaint - his second on the same issue.

The Prince and these related articles presented  no expert opinions, no data, no peer-reviewed paper, just a rage against wind machines. Since neither The Prince of Gaffes nor the three hacks bothered to understand the science, here's a short precis, which you can check in one millisecond on Google. Turbines on average generate 25% of their potential power per annum, as the wind is some times too weak or too strong. But if they are not being used or when they are operating, no C02 is added to the atmosphere. They are a carbon-neutral source of power, rather than a fuel. Renewables work only as a mix with fossil fuels and nuclear. Currently, they depend on subsidy to be economic, in part because fossil fuels unlike nuclear power does not carry any tax to cover their environmental impact. So when you burn coal, you are fucking future generations, except they pay for it, not you. Conventional power stations e.g. coal, gas or nuclear operate at best at 50 to 60% of capacity. Moreover, they coal plants and gas plants burn fuel which in turn adds to the CO2 load, whether the electricity grids needs the power or not.  No jokes there, just facts, which don't generate neat headlines for reactionary newspapers determined to rubbish green power and spread lies about climate science.

To recap, a wealthy white man who owns vast areas of Britain and never has to work for a living, thinks wind turbines are a bit of an eyesore and ruin his views from his country estates. Without spelling it out, he is 90 years old, so even if there were catastrophic climate change in the next century, I'm betting Prince Philip won't be around to witness it.

Old people say stupid, embarrassing things all the time; the trick is not to go around repeating them in public.

Friday 11 November 2011

History Lessons

Whenever there's a looming crisis or a war, politicians and commentators are keen to say they have learned the lessons of history, like schoolchildren being checked on their homework assignments. With the Euro about as stable as an overloaded Filipino ferry with a drunk captain in a typhoon, it is vital we are told, that politicians do not repeat the mistakes of the past. They certainly seem to have taken that message to heart, by making a completely new series of errors and blunders that will keep at least one sector of the economy booming: books on financial collapses. Robert Peston, Michael Lewis and Gillian Tett can rest easy, that follow-up title is pretty much going to write itself.

Tasty, but not worth the grief
But the real problem with learning the lessons of history is that you have to agree what that lesson is supposed to be. Sometimes, there is a relatively straightforward principle from the past that everyone can agree on such as: 'Do not invade Afghanistan'. But even that simple mantra is not quite correct. Invading Afghanistan is the easy part; the difficult part is trying to govern a group of armed, religious maniacs  who hold grudges for centuries. A more helpful motto for any outside force might be: 'Invade Afghanistan; leave Afghanistan quickly. Yes, it's got stunning scenery, the food is simply delicious but you could say the same about Turkey, which has a much better developed tourist infrastructure. Besides, you read The Kite Runner, what more do you want? '.

When anyone talks about learning from the past, they are really telling you how they think the world should be. Facts and figures are surprisingly plastic; they mould themselves well to any point of view. In the current Euro meltdown, the Germans political class is obsessed by the spectre of hyperinflation, which they think led to the rise of Hitler, which means they fervently opposed to any monetising of the Euro area debt.

Deja vu?
Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the Germans are brilliant when it comes to car-making, machine tools and suburban trams but hopeless when it comes to politics or indeed learning anything useful from their own history, unless forced to do so at the point of a gun by total defeat and military occupation.  The Nazi party vote only skyrocketed in 1931, during the Great Depression, where the German Chancellor along with many other leaders turned a recession into a depression by forcing through harsh austerity measures during a slowdown. Unemployment soared, production crashed, all to defend sound money. Does that sound familiar?

The other lesson that the German government seems singly unwilling to learn is that the rest of Europe does not appreciate being bossed around by sanctimonious Teutons, indeed we fought several wars on this very point. They  still do not fundamentally accept that the rest of the world is not the same as the good Burgers of Frankfurt or Munich and no matter how many Italian or Greek governments are deposed, they are not going to suddenly turn German.

But let's make this a constructive post as dear readers there are perhaps a handful of lessons from history that we  probably all agree on:

1. Beware of anyone trying to teach you the lessons of history, especially if they have a beard, e.g. Karl Marx.

2. Do not invade Afghanistan (see 2nd para).

3. Beware of Greeks bearing government bonds.

4. The Germans like telling people what to do; the British hate being told what to do. This never ends well. (See WW1 and WW2 for reference).

Sunday 23 October 2011

Offshore Madness

The 31st of October 2011 is the deadline for submitting your personal tax return on paper, which in the digital age seems rather quaint, a relic of a bygone age where people use fountain pens to write cheques,  denominated in guineas, for life's essentials such as top hats, shooting sticks and steamer trunks (whatever they were).

Nostalgia aside, no one from any era is a fan of paying tax, unless you do in fact work for HM Revenue and Customs when paying tax is more akin to the staff of John Lewis shopping at John Lewis - you genuinely are keeping yourself in a job. Although I suspect tax inspectors do not get a staff discount on their income tax. If they did, they might be more inclined to pick up the phone. That's directed to the Chapel Wharf Area Tax Office, you know who you are.  When I owed you money, I received menacing letters warning that you were going to repossess my left kidney (my favourite one, since you ask) and sell my wife to a sex trafficker. (Strictly speaking the letters they sent me did not actually threaten organ loss or spousal slavery; but they were curt and I know how to read between the lines). Of course when the debt is the other way round mysteriously enough the income tax refund gets stuck, as if the funds were somehow an overweight feline that had outgrown its catflap.

There is, however, one species of cat that has no problems wiggling out of tight spots.  It's a fat one, who receives a special  tax discount not available to the the little people (as the rest of humanity, tall or short, shall now be known). What's more, this type of moggy is well-greased by Her Majesty's servants. You guessed correctly, fat cats are back in the news again: in this case Goldman Sachs for a backroom deal  with the Revenue that avoided a £10 million liability.

Interesting the contrast between the small trader whose VAT receipts are late: he gets the knock and his property seized. But the likes of Goldman have a cozy arrangement that would do an African kleptocracy proud. For those of you that missed this latest banking wheeze, they had set up a Virgin Islands subsidiary to pay bonuses to its UK employees and after a chat with Dave Hartnett, the UK's most senior tax collector, were let off the money they owed. He did a similar deal with Vodafone, who by some accounts owed the Exchequer £6 billion and paid only £1.2 billion.

Scroungers in suits

Judging by the standards of the 25% of FTSE 100 companies who were named and shamed in the Action Aid report this month, the use of offshore companies located in tax havens to avoid UK taxes is widespread. Two prime offenders are Lloyd and RBS; yes state-owned banks have scores of offshore vehicles designed to avoid UK tax. It is beyond parody, beyond politics, beyond belief.

Brand Values 
In a sense, the rampant tax evasion and freeloading by high net worth individuals and corporations, with the supine assistance of accountants and lawyers who betray their own professional codes, would somehow be more acceptable if it were done brazenly, as a colossal 'Fuck You' to civil society. I guess it might not sit so well with their brand values. You would have to ask Barclays, Vodafone and BP what those values are exactly, if they do not include being a decent corporate citizen and paying your dues.

Yet those involved must have some twinge of conscience because they have to couch their immoral behaviour in the veneer of respectability,  so this is not  rampant tax evasion, parasitism and freeloading of the type if displayed by a member of the underclass would provoke The Daily Mail to new heights of indignation.  No, it is tax competition: a form of free enterprise and a bulwark to socialism.

The concept of tax competition
There is little point dealing with the substance of their arguments as there is none. Tax competition means every country must join in a race to the bottom, where you'll find Afghanistan, the country with one of the lowest tax takes in the world. Reform must take place within the context of people and corporations paying tax; evasion by offshore havens undermines the basic contract that a citizen and corporation makes with the state: live here, trade here, pay tax. Those hedge funds based in the Cayman Islands should actually live in the Cayman islands, the Tesco stores located in the UK owned by a Lichtenstein holding company should be relocated there, breeze block by breeze block if necessary.

Growing deficits in developed economies have coincided with an explosion in tax avoidance via offshore activities, with lost revenue accounting for over half the deficit by some calculations. Crack down on benefit scroungers and welfarism if you want, but how else would you describe an individual or multinational who derives all the benefits of UK civil society but avoids paying their dues?

Tax havens should be shut down by old fashioned gunboat diplomacy, using a boat with guns on it. Even though the British navy has been reduced to a canal barge with canon of Napoleonic vintage and a couple of blokes in outboards with cricket bats, they could still handle these offshore jurisdictions. Seriously, what exactly could Jersey do if we decided to send over some marines and forcibly open its books?  Likewise, the French should storm Monte Carlo, the Spanish march into Andorra, if the Germans can't quite bring themselves to invade Lichtenstein, subcontract the job to the Poles if you to get the job done properly.

The law needs to change: if it looks like duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it looks like tax evasion, then the burden of proof should be reversed so that companies must prove that setting up numerous shell companies in tropical islands that are notorious for laundering drug money is in  fact a legitimate way to structure a business. Likewise, lawyers and accountants who help offshore tax evasion should be held accountable, with criminal charges if appropriate. If a little person dodges his tax, they can face prison, why should it be any different because miscreant is better dressed?

Let's call time on this offshore party at our collective expense.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

Oversize Me

England's Olympic Squad
Britain is officially great, not economically or militarily, but when it comes to waist size we are in the first rank of flab. According to a recent survey, sixty percent of the UK's population are overweight; the other forty percent tried to eat the census taker...with chips and a  bottle of Lambrini.

Never fear though, Andrew Lansley, the health minister, is here to the rescue, proposing that we count the calories and display them in fast food restaurants. Unlike his Great Leap Forward for the health service, focusing our growing guts makes some sense. Although we may live as long as our grandparents, we will be doing so unable to leave the house without a flatbed truck and winch, reminiscing about the time we could see our feet without a remote camera.

Except we know lecturing people won't work. When a cigarette company marketed a brand called 'Death' with a skull and crossbones on the front, their  sales soared; the pack of 200 was even coffin-shaped. Back in the days when Tower Records existed, 'Death' had a display in their Piccadilly branch with skeletons and gravestones. I bought a pack at once and smoked it like cancer was just a star sign.

At American state fairs, stands advertise their high calorie wares such as deep fried butter with a picture of   paddles they use to shock a stopped heart; the public loves it. Humans seem to be hard wired to crave sugar and fat, a relic of our wandering days on the savannah. Unfortunately, what makes sense for hunter-gatherers who rarely if ever encounter sugar or fats is a bad strategy for desk-bound office potatoes whose sole exercise is moving a computer mouse or other mono-hand pursuits. Maybe if you did have to dodge marauding lions on the way to KFC you would burn up the calories, but all it would take is one fatal mauling and the scheme would have to be abandoned. Health and safety gone mad.

There are, however, other ways to fight the obesity crisis that don't involve releasing large carnivores into urban areas or lecturing people like naughty children. Try limiting the number of fast food outlets in the high street. Insist that every outlet be located at the top of a steep hill or fitted with running machines at the entrance, like that Ok Go video except with annoyed customers.

Install this in front of every junk food restaurant.

Do not, repeat do not get the likes of Cadbury's to sponsor some retarded idea of exchanging chocolate bars for sporting equipment, making the direct association in children's minds of junk food with athletics. Oh hang on, that's exactly what the Blair government did.  Learn the lesson of that mistake and do not what ever you do make official sponsors of the 2012 Olympics the likes of Coke or build the largest ever McDonald's in the world at the Stratford site. Oh hang on...

The same government and local authorities lecturing us on calories are busy turning every high street in Britain into one uninterrupted branch of Subway-KFC-Pizza Hut-McDonalds-Burger King-Greggs-Chicken Cottage -Kombo Feeding Warehouse. It's not the calories that need counting. After all, how many branches of Subway does the world need? The answer is any number less than one in case you're interested.

Now, where's that takeaway?

Monday 3 October 2011

Stimulating Packages


Occasionally you hear a politician say something so breathtakingly stupid and contradictory it makes you want to hurl something across the room in a howl of desperate rage.  This morning as I listened to the Today programme, I  wanted to take my  i-pod and DAB combo radio, get a taxi to Broadcasting House and fling the black cube at George Osborne. Obviously common sense intervened before the armed police did and I calculated by the time the cab had negotiated rush hour traffic, George would probably be heading back to Number 11.  There's always a chance he'll repeat the idiocy this evening, but then I will be watching on TV and getting a large flatscreen off the wall mounting is simply too much like hard work.

In amongst all the talk of 'packages', 'stimulus' and 'growth spurts', which turns out to be much less fun than you think, was a discussion of Wonderboy George's magic fix for the British economy which as you may have noticed is about as lively as the parrot in the Python sketch. It is an ex-economy. His claim was that freezing council tax would help boost the economy, some £800 million in all, found apparently down the back of the Treasury sofa along with Domino's pizza menu, a leaky biro and an old remote control. But in the same interview, he asserted we must also cut the deficit which would not harm growth prospects, whilst planning to cut corporation tax further. Observe the strange logic here: cutting £40 billion of deficit spending from the government will have no effect on the economy, but £800 million will.  This is not a cake-having and eating scenario, this is having the cake, taking a photo of it, eating the cake, then printing ten colour copies of the cake and trying to pass them off as actual cakes to other people.

Asking for trouble 
Moreover no one has satisfactorily explained how cutting corporation tax is going to have any effect on the collapse in domestic demand and  vast debt burden. Judging by the FTSE 100 companies' behaviour, their principal aim at the moment seems to be shovelling as much cash into their senior executives' pockets, regardless of performance. In a period of deep recession and share price collapse, executive pay rose 32%, which means as a multiple of average earnings it's trebled in ten years. By all means cut corporation tax, but it's a bit like giving Pete Doherty a big bag of crack to look after, you have only yourself to blame.

This is not to say that the Labour party has anything remotely useful to offer in the current situation. Their economic cure all is that no one in the public sector should ever lose their job ever, even if a broken shop dummy would have better productivity.  I am probably making their programme sound more coherent than it actually is. As for the Liberals, they claim a mansion tax is the answer, but as we aren't living in a real life version of Downton Abbey, the lack of actual mansions in the UK seems to undermine their case.

A wise investment 
The Bank of England is about to start another round of quantitive easing, which is money-printing by another name; it is often described as the equivalent of helicopter dropping money onto the economy. Except you never hear anyone suggest doing exactly that: putting money directly in people's hands. I think it is because deep down politicians and economists feel that, for example, granting every single British taxpayer a sizeable cash credit that had to be used in three months would somehow be...cheating. Pouring billions into bankrupt banks, buying your own debt, all of this is acceptable policy. But the final logical step which would immediately kick start demand, the genuine money drop, is off limits. Perhaps there remains some deep seated mistrust about what we would do with the money: some people would no doubt spend it on frivolities like shoes or hats or perhaps just one very expensive hat. The rest of us would spend some, possibly on a wider range of goods and services than millinery, and save the remainder.  The net effect would be to boost domestic demand and help recapitalise the banks.

£200 billion of quantitive easing and the dead-parrot economy is only just about staying upright because someone nailed it to its perch.  Or you could have credited every single taxpayer with £7,692. Who would you trust with the money: yourself or those financial masters of disaster?

Dear Mr Osborne, I'd fire up the chopper if I were you.


(For more stats and numbers see this interesting article: Who eat all the QE pies?)





Saturday 17 September 2011

Euro Trash

The past few weeks have not been happy ones for that rare creature in the UK, the Europhile, a breed that will soon be put on the endangered species list alongside the corncrake and the greater horseshoe bat. If not endangered, anyone expressing pro-European sentiments in most pubs in England will definitely be a threatened species; indeed the Europhile may need police protection like that other type of 'phile' who is not allowed near schools.  In Scotland, Wales and any part of Britain where more people work for the state than private business, together with selected enclaves of London where the doors are all the same shadow of Farrow and Ball (mouse back) and everyone reads The New Statesman,  there are a few pro-Europeans left; but otherwise support for the European Union has collapsed to an all time low. How is it is that the Euro dream has turned to trash?

The Europhile - a rare species

Born of the very reasonable desire to stop Germany trampling over national sovereignty and insisting that everywhere be run like the Reich, the European Project seems to have come full circle to a point where Germany ignores national parliaments and keeps telling everyone what to do, in this instance imposing self-defeating austerity measures.  The Euro, the currency union without a state, has proved to be a catastrophic mistake on a par with the Captain of the Titanic's decision to steer his ship right next to the iceberg to restock his ice-bucket: it's just not worth the grief. Instead of promoting prosperity , shackling the turbo-charged Teutons to the work-allergic Greeks has created an infernal wealth destruction machine about as sensible as burning €100 notes for fuel. Mind you, if the crisis continues much longer, any Euro notes issued in Athens will be being going up in flames.

Back when the Euro was created, some of us, including yours truly, knew it was a stupid idea to pretend that the Portugese or Greek economy should have the same currency and interest rates as Germany. I arrived at this brilliant insight by not being a massively overpaid bond trader and taking a package deal to Crete. My conclusion was that Greece was a lovely place to take a holiday, but given that its citizens struggled to run a pedalo business on a crowded beach in high season and the country had a political class which made FIFA officials seem models of probity, it was not the wisest call to lend them billions. Or if you did, make sure you charged a sufficient premium for the risk or NBAARGCF rate (not being an anally retentive German control freak). Naturally, those clever bankers and bond traders decided to buy Greek debt at only a small fraction above German bonds. Yes, the more stories you hear like that, the more you feel a Lenin-style banking reform is in order: shoot a few 'pour encourager les autres'.

Unfortunately executing bankers, no matter how much fun it might be (especially if broadcast live as Who Wants to Shoot a Millionaire?) is illegal and against the European Convention on Human Rights. Those bloody Europeans again!  There is, however, much more to the Euro crisis than just money. It is really about who we want in charge and no one, not even the pro-Europeans, voted for the current situation where the European Central Bank is committing vast sums of money on behalf of member states whilst being accountable to no one.

The Hellenic Handshake 
The Greek government has taken huge loans at absurdly low rates, with no prospect of paying back the money, yet its people cannot chose the rational course of default and exiting the Euro. The Germans, were it not for war guilt, would have called time on this madness long ago; they too did not vote to work and save so that the Greek elite pay no tax and its civil servants retire at 55. Regardless if they get all the sun loungers in the Med, another €8 billon bailout is a bridge too far.

UBS has just published a report claiming the break up of the Euro would cost both Germany and Greece 40% of their GDP in the first year and 15% each subsequent year. This is the same bank whose trader just lost them €2billion in unauthorised deals, was fined $780 millon for helping US citizens avoid tax and lost the most of any Euro bank in the subprime debacle, a cool £14.4 billion to be precise. Maybe we can do without this kind of expert advice? The truth is that many countries including Iceland, Argentina, Mexico and Russia have bounced back after default and devaluation. It's the dirty secret that must not get out, sometimes not paying back what you owe works out fine.

Bizarrely even anti-Europeans are now suggesting the only way to save the Euro is full political union, which is an extreme version of the sunk money fallacy. A good example of this faulty logic is paying for expensive theatre tickets and sitting to the end of the show even though you hate it, because...well you want to get your money's worth. This seems to me explain why many of the audience remain to the bitter end of Lloyd-Webber's musical atrocities (and if even they wanted to leave, the coach won't be setting off to Birmingham until 10.30 p.m. anyway).

The truth is the money lent to Greece is gone, as is a percentage of the money lent to Ireland, Spain and Portugal, so why not accept it and move on? With capital controls and tight regulation of the financial markets, breaking up the Euro may end up saving us a fortune.  And forgetting the numbers for a moment, none of us voted for Angela Merkel, not even a majority of the German electorate. We're Brits, let's stick to our own home grown bunch of useless politicians.

Monday 5 September 2011

Narrow Banking

In recent years, everyone who didn't work in the financial sector  had to learn a bewildering array of new terms such as CDS, CDO to discover why were all FCUKD. Financial armageddon threw up novel buzzwords like toxic debt which is actually a polite way of saying a 'piece of crap'. In fact one Goldman Sachs employee used that very phrase to one of his colleagues when describing a  Goldman's securitised debt product known as Timberwolf. This debt bundle is currently the subject of numerous lawsuits and now a probe by the Serious Fraud Office.  I imagine the buyers of Timberwolf wish they had bought actual wolf shit instead of American subprime mortgages.

So why mention all of this now? The ICB, the Independent Commission on Banking, is proposing that we split retail and investment or casino banking. To compare investment banking to casinos is a slur on casinos who are a lot more ethical and do a lot less damage to our collective wallets. Splitting regular retail or consumer deposit taking banking from exotic trades involving derivates is what is called 'narrow banking'  or 'common sense'. The banks don't like it, so David Cameron wants to water down the proposals. I'm probably being unfair in suggesting there is a relationship between the Tory party's funding coming almost exclusively from financial services firms and David Cameron's desire to neuter banking reform even after the worst financial catastrophe in British history. There's no link at all. I'm sure George Osborne is similarly independent. When he leaves government, I doubt that there will be any connection between his taking a  lucrative directorship in a bank and his opposition to structural reform whilst in government.

Banks don't like the split between retail and investment, because it reduces profits. It reduces profits in the same that forcing a ferry company to provide lifejackets reduces profits or putting fire exits into commercial properties hits the developers' margins. Sometimes you have to take a bit of small short term pain to avoid long term catastrophe.


If you think about this way, banking reform is a like a vaccination: putting up with one little prick, the BCG jab, to avoid a much bigger prick later on. In case of BCG, then it's tuberculosis, in the example of banking, the bigger pricks would be Bob Diamond, Lloyd Blankfein  and friends. Now I realise that comparing bankers who oppose reform to lethal pathogens such as TB is a little unfair. The TB bacterium is just doing what comes naturally. On its CV, its skills are just 'being a TB bacterium' and even if  it went down the job centre, not even Currys Digital would hire it as Saturday staff.


Bankers on the other hand have choices. Bob Diamond of Barclays, to pick someone entirely at random who said last year that banking bashing had got out of hand and also recently hoped the coalition didn't lose its nerve on cuts, whilst pocketing a £13 million pay cheque for moving other people's money around, that Bob could do other things, he has choices. I'm sure his CV includes a range of skills. He could - and this is just friendly advice - go for a really long walk and not bother coming back. (This is the same Bob who runs a bank that managed to pay only £113 million in UK tax on £4.6 billion profit, in 2009. So I guess he's good with numbers if nothing else).

Sadly she dies of anthrax in the next scene. 
Narrow banking matters if we want to vaccinate ourselves against financial epidemics. The new blockbuster Contagion takes as its premise a disease for which there is no known cure. It is a terrifying, depressing vision of future apocalypse with the only light relief being Gwyneth Paltrow's sudden death at the beginning of the film.  I predict a box office smash and suggest that producers introduce this plot twist into all of Gwyneth Paltrow's films; it's hard to think of one which would not have been vastly improved by her character's death within the first ten minutes. Same holds true for Keira Knightley.

But I  digress, the important difference between the fictional contagion and our affliction is a known cure exists: narrow banking.  Mr Cameron, please for once, try to do the right thing. Spike Lee seemed to think it was throwing a bin through a pizza parlour window, unless I missed the moral of that film. Don't throw anything through shop windows, we've only just got them fixed after the riots. Just let the Independent Commission on Banking be independent and do what they suggest.





Saturday 27 August 2011

British Rail

Rail fares are going up again, in some cases by up to 13% and the government still has to chuck £3.7  billion at the rail franchise companies, more in real terms than under the bad old days of British Rail. If you want to travel the London to Bristol route at peak time, it costs £169 for a return. For the same price, you can fly to Rome. But when in Rome, you'll find that if you do as the Romans do, you'll pay 50% less for train tickets.

In Britain, unlike those stupid Continentals with their high speed rail links and affordably priced fares, we have decided that the purpose of the railway network is to provide good retail units for branches of Marks and Spencers Simply Food and the West Cornwall Pasty Company. The trains and stations themselves are an expensive inconvenience, perhaps we should just do away with them altogether and fill the space with more branches of Clinton Cards and WH Smiths. Now anyone who remembers the catering options of British Rail will agree that a beef and stilton pasty is a huge improvement on the state run burger chain Casey Jones, a franchise found only at stations for good reason. The burgers were marginally more edible than a fried newspaper and the chips were actually made from wood pulp.  Casey Jones' unique offering was an ultra thick milkshake, which doubled as a soft drink and a heavy-duty industrial lubricant.

Yes, the food was terrible, and yes British Rail had questionable advertising such as the posters of Gary Glitter in tight trousers. Another odd BR campaign was for Motorail, a bizarre concept where instead of driving to your destination, you put your car on a train to get there which is sort of the point of owning a car in the first place. Based on the advert, Motorail's appeal was that you could get thoroughly plastered in the buffet carriage and then drive your Rover into a tree the moment you disembarked.

The truth is that the privatisation of the railways has benefited no one apart from consultants, lawyers and certain chief executives of rolling stock companies. Pound for pound, Network Rail's capital investment delivers one third of what British Rail achieved.  All the Major government did was transfer a public monopoly to a private one, leaving us with the most expensive rail network in the world. On the plus side though, the sandwiches are better.

Sky high prices and ticket options which would baffle a maths professor, have put people off rail travel.  This is a  real shame as there numerous social benefits of railways versus private cars: less pollution, less congestion and less unbelievably tedious conversations between Jeremy Clarkson book reading males about the  relative merits of luxury diesel saloons.

Let's get retro, do a Life on Mars and bring back British Rail. Many privatisations have been highly successful but this was always going to be disaster. It also spurred the growth of The Sock Shop, now mercifully defunct, where busy commuters could buy hideous novelty socks for their loved ones. This partly explains Britain's rising divorce rate during that that era.

The railways were originally private, but they were dogged by safety concerns, funding crises, lack of capital investment and were chronically unable to make money. Does that sound familiar and ever wonder why they were nationalised in the first place?  The free market does many things very well, like providing a wide range of snack options, magazines and books, but it's no way to run a railway.



Wednesday 17 August 2011

Debt Monster

Every week that sails by, the Western economies sink deeper and deeper into debt, with one exception, Germany, who foolishly based its economic growth on high-end manufacturing rather than house prices and hedge funds.  American superpower is revealed to be less stable than a house of cards in an epileptic's house in an earthquake zone.  The USA's political journey is from super state  to supergimp; its recent political paralysis much like Superman neutralised by kryptonite, a toxic, alien substance, in this case known as the Tea Party. And remember when Superman loses his powers thanks to kryptonite; then he's a just a strange man wearing his underpants on the outside of a lyrca bodysuit. Next thing you know he's chaining himself to railings outside the Family Court, howling that the bitch won't let him see the kids.

We are all collectively drowning in debt, most of it owed to the Chinese. They have such vast foreign reserves that they could buy Italy; or alternatively Portugal and Spain with Ireland thrown in as a three for two deal. I'm not sure exactly what the Chinese would do with Italy, but if they start installing a monorail into the hollowed out base of Mount Vesuvius we should be worried.

Individually Britons are in saddled with debt. Our corporations are loaded down with debt, the public sector is infested with PFI contracts (which is just another way of saying debt, plus loan shark mark-ups for the consultants involved), not forgetting the Treasury which is borrowing so much that I think our grandchildren will have to work until they are 85 to collect a state pension. It will still be £5000, but thanks to compound interest only buys half a Curly Wurly.

Now there's no point asking most economists for help, they failed to spot the last recession and still cannot explain how it's possible that the UK has undergone the longest ever boom in its economic history and everyone is flat broke. Perhaps you have to do a Masters to figure that one out. But one very smart economist, Nouriel Roubini, one of the very few who predicted the 2008 crash and the current second round of calamities has a heretical idea: debt default.

Without debt default or to use the acceptable term 'restructuring', how are going to slay the debt monster? St George Osborne's brilliant plan for recovery is that we should all take a huge hit in the standard of living so that no one in the banking industry takes a loss on their crappy loans. I think the debt dragon is going to win this encounter with our noble knight Osborne, because quite frankly, what is the point of us working hard, setting up new enterprises so that we can bail out some moronic, borderline criminal investment that RBS made on Irish property or American subprime mortgages. Seriously, what is the point? I would rather bang my head against a brick wall, ideally a wall made of bricks baked with the blood of dead bankers.

If the UK were a person, we would go bankrupt, renegotiate our terms and bounce back. It's worked for Donald Trump and countless other enterpreneurs.  In Trump's case that is in spite of a hairpiece that defies both the laws of fashion and physics.  I don't know about you lot, but the idea of working for the next 30 years so Bob Diamond and his peers don't suffer a loss on their loan books and their precious bonuses, isn't like being on a treadmill:  it's a treadmill that's going backwards down a hill whilst you're being pickpocketed.

Thursday 11 August 2011

Mental Revolt

Order has been restored by the police and we should all breath a sigh of relief, whilst quietly chucking in the canal the brass knuckles and can of mace we bought off the internet. It will no longer to necessary for men to patrol their streets in vigilante groups, which is a shame because I had a whole look worked out, based on the 1979 urban gang classic The Warriors. We were going to dress in cricket pads, gloves and helmets, coloured black to show we meant business and be called 'The Fast Balls'. Looters would be dispatched with cries of 'Six'. My fellow vigilantes and I would trade humorous quips about leg breaks whilst actually breaking bones. Best thing about being dressed in full cricket gear is the police cannot stop you for carrying a bat as an offensive weapon. The stumps converted to fire live ammunition, those were always going to take a bit of explaining.

The London riots and their viral spread around different cities were unexpected; the poor quality journalism that followed was perhaps more predictable and the clean up for that will take a while. The Left in particular has gone into denial mode, much like right wing commentators went into intellectual lockdown about the financial crisis. They just can't admit their cherished belief in self-regulating markets has been falsified and resort to bizarre leaps of logic, where it all ends up being Bill Clinton's fault that Goldman Sachs devised toxic securitised debt products. Don't even mention the bank bail outs,  the masters of the capitalist universe taking public money from the dead hand of the state. If you remember another eighties classic War Games, this is the bit where the computer controlling America's nukes fries its own brain through a logic loop.

Much the same mental gymnastics, revolts and loops are happening now in the minds of British liberals. You see the riots must have a cause, probably police brutality or racism. What about those children firebombing a police station in Nottingham? Then it must be the alienated youth. But several of the rioters are in their thirties and have jobs?  Consumer society, it's all our fault for being greedy as a society. We should really see gangs of ten year olds descending on Debenhams as a social critique, a form of spontaneous political street theatre. They certainly aren't to be blame, it was society wot robbed Boots. And didn't Cameron smash up a restaurant when he was in the Bullingdon club, so in a way he started it twenty years ago in an Oxford Tandoori.

The other important thing to consider is sometimes you have to have studied at university and read a lot of turgid tomes to say things as stupid as many of the chatterati:  these riots have complex roots and we need to listen to what the youth are saying on the street. It goes like this: 'Yo mate, gis ya phone or I'll shank you'.

'Some men just want to watch the world burn', to quote The Dark Knight. We don't need detailed, verbose and fatuous commentary to work out that people have evil, destructive impulses and they have to be kept in check. Have you seen Primark when there's a sale on? The riots were an eruption of those dark passions, you only need to hear the rioters description of why they set fire to buildings. It was fun.

Some of the reluctance to admit that ideas and policies need to change is a misguided belief amongst many liberal people that it's a binary choice: North Korea or Woodstock, there's nothing in between.  Fascist or hippy, pick a team and stick with it.

 If you say you are in favour of more police with tougher tactics and expanded prison places,  that does not mean you are also rejecting all the social changes after the 1960s. You can be in favour of gay marriage and water cannons, though preferably not at the same venue.







Tuesday 9 August 2011

London Road

Over the last few days, Londoners witnessed a giant psychological experiment: what happens when the police lose control? All across London Town, regular law-abiding citizens were wondering if their city had become a real life version of The Road and were making secret mental calculations about what they should do if the forces of law and order were overwhelmed. Vigo Mortensen ran a bath and it is important not to let personal grooming standards slip even if gangs of looters roam the streets. But many of us, rather than washing, were doing a mental tally of potential weapons and realised that a breadknife and a beach tennis set were a bit lacking. My personal arsenal amounted to a squash racket, a kitchen knife and an elephant prod; so I'm fine if I come up against  a pachyderm armed only with squash balls and a courgette.

None of us are much keen to take part in another re-enactment of Mad Max dsytopia, especially not if we live in a flat above JD Sports. If renting above commercial premises, make sure you pick a retailing unit that is anathema to ratboys. I would suggest a vegan cafe, run by transgender classical music enthusiasts is a safe bet. Either that or make sure you flatshare only with cage fighters or ex-special forces.

It was a tough call which was more depressing: watching brain-dead junior G's torching their own neighbourhoods or listening to politicians scoring cheap political points during the mayhem. When your neighbourhood is on fire, let's concentrate on putting it out. That's you at the back Dianne Abbot and Ken Livingstone. I do hope Darcus Howe was drunk during his Newsnight performance of Monday evening, that would be some kind of excuse for comparing the looting of Foot Locker to political protests.

Although many people will also be asking questions about Teresa May. What is the point of having a Tory home secretary if they are going to say things like 'the way we do policing is through community consent'.  I'm going to take a wild guess and say the residents of Clapham Junction would consent to a more vigorous police response.  She should have stared down the camera lens and said  'we will terminate these riots with extreme prejudice' and watch the poll ratings jump.

There's no doubt that during the last 48 hours, many normally pacifist types will have been shouting at their TVs for some real police brutality, especially when you hear a rat girl in Birmingham saying the 'police don't respect us'. Apparently that's why she and her friends felt they could help themselves to the contents of the Orange shop. If we're talking respect, then we, the regular citizens, could reclaim the word. For every masked teenager that was out on the street, there were hundreds in Hackney who weren't, wishing that someone in their neighbourhood would stand up to the gangs and the hoodlums.

That's us, by the way, who have to stand up to the gangs.  You cannot solely rely on the police for a civil society.  Every time we let a teenager drop litter in the street, swear and spit at passers-by, disrupt lessons, play their music loud on the bus, rob someone in plain view, we lose respect for ourselves and our communities. We put our heads down and walk on by.  Sure, when there's ten youths smashing up a phone box, then calling the police is the right idea. I'm not getting stabbed for BT, particularly not with their line rental charges. But as a general rule, law-abiding citizens need to man up (in a non-sexist manner).

When anti-social youths demand respect, we owe them nothing but contempt. They are a minority in these areas, what about the silent majority in Tottenham or Dalston who has to put up with this petty criminality 24-7. Why did not one commentator talk about them? No, all the debate was how we needed to undertand the youths more. I think the rest of us understood what they wanted pretty well: to set things on fire and a new TV.

We should collectively take back our streets, our parks and our public transport. There's so many more of us than the scrotes, let's think Gandhi with attitude. The Turkish shopkeepers of Kingsland Road had the right approach, try to loot our shops and we will batter you with sticks.  If we don't take back our public spaces, then get used to some more nights like the past week.

For inspiration, clink on these links:

Community policing Turkish style

Grandma tells it like it is

More power to your elbows

Additional note Weds 10th August - the tragic deaths in Birmingham don't change the need for us to take charge of our own cities. More police on London streets has calmed things down, but we can't live in lockdown because of a bunch of ratboys and ratgirls. They are angry, so the usual apologists say, because there are no jobs. Yes, there are no jobs for violent, foul-mouthed wannabe gangsters, very true, employers tend to be a bit picky about the whole can you be trusted with stock or money thing. See this: . that little dot is the world's smallest orchestra playing for those poor frustrated looters. It's playing just for them.

Thursday 4 August 2011

Turning Japanese

JK is a little bit worried that Britain might be turning Japanese. No, I don't mean we're going to eat more raw fish, have elaborate hot drink ceremonies, read dodgy cartoon porn or digitally record every waking moment of our entire lives. It's the economy stupid; it's turning Japanese. Back in the eighties, the land of the Rising Sun was the nation which produced the Walkman, the compact disc, the Honda Civc and of course everyone's favourite karate grandfather figure Mr Miyagi. There were even those Benihana restaurants (not strictly Japanese, but as close as the Americans could manage), where the chefs juggled knives at your table, which was also a metal cooking plate. Amazing!

Being Japanese was cool; they were the future, even if Hello Kitty was and still is, deeply weird. They were also the richest nation on Earth and we decided to forgive them for the genocidal war they launched a mere generation ago, on account of Nintendo's Super Mario being so much fun.

No one wants to be Japanese any more.  Over the last twenty years, Japan has experienced no net growth whatsoever and by some measures they are worse off. They had a massive property boom, followed by a huge slump, banking bailouts and wholescale state intervention in the markets, leaving Japan with a whopping 200% sovereign debt. Politician after politcian has ducked the difficult choices, sound familiar?

The recent fiasco with the American Debt Ceiling, which despite it's name is nothing to do with DIY or loft extensions, is only a taste of what's to come. Notice the UK latest's growth figures, which were zero in all but name. Now apparently there were lots of exceptional factors: the Royal Wedding, warm weather, wet weather, the price of fish. This, to use a technical economics term, is a load of bollocks. We're hosing down the country with money, borrowing £165 billion a year, and interest rates mean that with inflation, money is virtually free. Yet the growth figure we managed is... wait for it...0.2% - a rounding error, the sort of money the Chancellor might find down the back of the metaphorical Treasury sofa. The lousy growth figures  do not necessarily mean we should scrap the the austerity plan. Like the new boy in the prison showers, surrounded by a group of burly, tattooed men, we are screwed whichever way we turn.

There was no way we could start trying to reverse the largest credit boom in human history and not expect a little  pain re-adjusting. Going cold-turkey off a debt binge is going to produce some scary side effects, the economic equivalent of the dead baby on the ceiling when Renton kicks smack in Trainspotting.

But one habit we should definitely quit is the childish whining that it's all our politicians fault. It isn't. We chose to pay too much for houses, again - remember the other housing bust and the one before that? We bought things we couldn't afford, we preferred cheap credit and cheap mortgages to responsible behaviour. As nations, the British and Americans behaved like a drunk teenager given access to dad's credit card.

If we want to avoid wasted decades like Japan experienced, then perhaps we should take a little responsibility for own actions which means allowing politicians to talk openly about the problems, instead of the pantomimes which currently pass for TV interviews.  Note to Newsnight producers and presenters, finding small inconsistencies in what one government politician said relative to another is not investigative journalism, unless your aim is to achieve Stalinist orthodoxy in all organs of government.

Here's another thought, why not try electing someone on the basis of their abilities rather than how good they look on camera. You must have noticed that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband are basically the same person and not even an interesting one - just a vapid, focus group's idea of what politicians should look like: the margherita pizza of leadership candidates. Perhaps the reason Cameron kept inviting Rebekah Brooks round for dinner is he was short of guests, because unless you wanted a government contract or a tax break,  you wouldn't want to spend three hours with the man, a waxwork has more personality.

The first step in beating an addiction is to admit you have a problem. We're debt junkies, time to face facts. Or we could bury our heads in the sand and blame our politicians. As The Vapors sang in 1980, 'I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese'

Friday 22 July 2011

Closet Films

What a treat JK has for all you film fans this week! If you have scanned the multiplex listings in vain for a film that isn't based on a children's toy, a theme park ride or a comic book, then fear not, JK swooshes to the rescue with a new way of watching films. Whilst we are on the subject of piss poor summer fodder, most of which are comic book adaptations, somebody in Hollywood has a lot of explaining to do for the Green Lantern atrocity.  Was it a two for a one offer with Batman? Even by the abysmal dress sense of superheroes, who generally resemble skinny wrestlers or drag queens without the lip gloss,  Green Lantern looks particularly stupid.  He is less universe saving superhero, more struggling actor working for the Irish tourist board as a good-looking leprechaun, using his turquoise torch for night time guided walks of old Dublin town.

Apparently the effluent of terrible comic book films is all to do with international sales, so when you get angry that there's nothing to watch or rent, blame a 14 year old boy in Korea as  he is the studios' target market. Although even Jin Min Jin thinks Green Lantern was a steaming pile of camel dung, topped with a dead dog sprinkled with dried rats' anuses and yes he was that specific.. But what's this new way of watching films you ask? Welcome to the wonderful world of closet cinema, which is all about films that on the surface play it macho and straight; underneath they are desperate to come out of the closet. The makers typically did not realise the mixed interpretations, which proves another universal truth, the law of unintended consequences.

So, let's look at some strong contenders from recent times. (Just to note, being a closet film is not a bad thing, the gayness or otherwise of a film is simply a genre tag and this gives many films a whole new spin).  Right up there, naturally, is the adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel, 300. As this blog is too short to list all the homo-erotic elements of this film, let's stick to the highlights. Men spend nearly all their time in the company of other men, dressed only in the their underpants. Their primary activities are: weightlifting judging by their six/eight packs, wrestling each other, whipping small boys and fighting with spears and swords, in other words stabbing other men with phallic objects. If the Spartans weren't quite proof enough, their Persian opponents are S & M fetishists, whose leader is a giant, studded and pierced man who wears make-up. Did I forget to mention he's carried around on a throne by lots of burly men?  The Twilight  films are on the surface aimed at straight women, except that the leading lady looks like a bloke and all the men, whether they are vampires, werewolves or normals spend a lot of time running around with their shirts off. Even with films like The Hangover, you can't shake the feeling that the boys would be much happier if there was no wedding or women involved at all and then could spend the rest of the time hanging out together, probably playing rough house in just their boxers.

The Closet Film club is open to anyone and you can join in any time you like, giving your favourite films a whole new twist. For example, JK's personal fave, The Lord of Rings trilogy, quite apart from the title, has surprisingly strong gay undercurrents. When Sauruman instructed his Uruk Hai to taste 'man flesh', the double meaning was in plain view. Throughout the film, women are generally an annoyance or distract men from the important business of wearing leather and pouting.

Pick any film you like and see if there's a hidden subtext, for example Top Gun, Days of Thunder or Cocktail to pluck any three unrelated, in no way linked films at random.

Next blog, JK has a go at David Cameron, because he clearly wasn't bullied enough at school.

Monday 11 July 2011

Moral Compass

One day Rupert Murdoch is about to take over all of UK broadcasting, the next he's had to close down News of the World and his son might be investigated by the US authorities. Wonder what jail time would be like for someone involved in hacking the phones of 9/11 victims? JK is worried this is one of those very realistic dreams you get by eating a lot of cheese before you go to bed, which on occasion he has confused with reality, started telling someone then realised part way through he was describing his dream, a very disturbing one involving Cagney from Cagney and Lacy, custard and an awkward position from the Karma Sutra, was about to mention the explicit content and had to spill a drink on himself to avoid social armageddon. No, JK doesn't get asked to parties much. Turns out this is not a dairy product hallucination and the maudlin, mob justice tattle rag has disappeared for good.

A refuse truck worth of  garbage has already been spouted about how sad it is that the NOTW has gone, usually from moral cowards keen to brown nose Murdoch.  Notice the relative coverage given to the loss of 1,400 jobs at Bombardier, a UK train carriage manufacturer screwed over by the madness that is PFI, to the loss of 200 jobs of print journalism. Bombardier lost out to Siemens, not on the merits of its bid, simply that it was unable to offer a PFI style financing deal. Way to go on the manufacturing recovery George!

Back to the phone hackers at the not-mourned-at-all-NOTW, a question occurs to this simian typist,  in the 168 years that the NOTW existed, name one positive contribution to British public life....take all the time you like...no rush...anything at all.....no...really...not one? In case you're wondering the Sarah's Law campaign does not count, it doesn't prevent child abuse and is more likely to send paedophiles into hiding. Plus the really dirty secret is over 80% of abuse is in the home, forget Sarah's Law, it's dodgy Uncle Pete you should be worrying about. But it seems The News of the World and the truth or ethics were never close friends, perhaps fuckbuddies when it suited them.


I think the best some commentators  managed was that the paper was un-PC. Perhaps Toby Young and Piers Morgan would prefer to turn the clock back the 1970s when you could call a spade a spade; the rest of us, who have mentally rather than just physically passed through adolescence, disagree. Now that even worse acts have come to light, such as obtaining confidential medical data about Gordon Brown's sick child - words fail this ape. They also seemed to have failed the useless idiots who were cheerleading for the poison rag only days before. No witty contrarian comebacks now lads?

What is most interesting about this sorry episode of phone hackers, lax editors, bent coppers and supine politicians, mute and compliant media is the complete absence of a functioning moral compass amongst the lot of them. A moral compass is your very own Sat Nav for life, telling what's right, what's wrong and when you're getting into dodgy areas. But for your moral compass to work, you must calibrate it correctly (if you'll go with the analogy) otherwise like a malfunctioning GPS system it will lead you to a dead end or the wrong part of town - like those van drivers you see on You've Been Framed who have ended up in a lake because their TomTom told that was the quickest route back to Chipping Norton.

So consider the journey The News of the World took from a regular tattle sheet reporting crime to committing crime and not just minor offenses, serious breaches of the law - bribing the police, hacking victim's phones, compromising royal security. All of this slide into criminality happened because senior management and staff lacked boundaries and failed to set limits on what acceptable in the pursuit of a story. They broke taboos that are there for a reason - leaving grieving parents in peace, not paying police officers, obtaining confidential medical records and see what it has done to them as people.

It is also an invaluable lesson in the nature of evil which is not confined to a wild-eyed photo of a serial killer or a grainy film of Nazi atrocities, it is  also what happened at that paper and the consequences of that deep and profound amorality. Whilst the outgoing editor might have nothing to do with the worst offenses committed under Brook's tenure, name checking Orwell in the final, cringe-making  edition of The News of the World, shows that there something terminally rotten in the State of Wapping.  Orwell mentioned the rag is 'The Decline of English Murder', he wrote about many subjects from Stalinism to football, none of which count as an endorsement. How desperate, how lacking in humility or self-awareness do you have to try a stunt like that -  attempting to bracket the greatest writer of the 20th century with your wretched paper?  The NOTW was the Scout Master caught messing with the boys' woggles - walk away in shame and silence, don't start mumbling about famous writers.

JK was pleased to see the Twitter campaign made advertisers pull their funding, but there are plenty more papers in the News Corp stable. This is not over yet. Shame the real villains have yet to be called to account and we all know who they are.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Human Resources

So Coldplay played Glatsonbury and unfortunately the ground did not open to swallow them up and send them to a special bland circle of hell where they had to listen to their own music over and over again . JK watched about ten minutes on TV and felt a little bit of his soul die, seeing 10,000s of people sway to the beige noodlings of Chris Martin - the audio equivalent of Farrow and Ball's neutral paint range. Simon Cowell's meat puppets are bad enough, but to stand in a field listening to that dirge is beyond comprehension. Give me Camp X-Ray and a long weekend of water-boarding any day.

But your favourite typing ape wants to ignore the news this week which we should probably do on a more regular basis. Ideally we should ignore 90% of everything we read in the media, the tricky part  is to work out which bits. Fortunately Melaine Phillips puts her name at the end of her nonsense so that's one care in the community rant off the list. No, JK wants to talk about a uniquely modern plague: 'Human Resources'. Once a company gets to a certain size, it has to employ staff in a department that used to be called 'Personnel', which was obviously an outdated term as it accurately described its function: to find people to work for the company and to keep those working for the company happy enough so they turned up for work more or less on time and didn't steal too much to dent the profits.  A simple, straightforward term so naturally you silly monkeys had to change it.

They have a saying: those who can do, those who can't do teach, those who can't teach, teach PE. Those who can't teach PE work in Human Resources. And those who can't work in Human Resources are clinically dead with no detectable brain stem activity and shuffle around as Saturday staff for Currys Digital. Now you might think it's a bit unfair to pick on one group of people for doing their job and it is true that HR workers perform a useful function of stapling CVs together and filing things, which even though it could be performed by a robot would be too expensive and frankly a waste of good automation. They don't cause much harm as long as you don't leave them unsupervised near scissors.

The phrase "Human Resources', introduced to make companies appear more caring, is in fact a deeply stupid and insulting term. People are not resources like mineral reserves or property, they are humans who have traded their time and effort with a company for money. It is all part of a modern management trend which uses token words as a substitute for actual management. For change management read redundancies; consultation means we've made up minds up already . One of the make-work exercises HR love to inflict on staff is the yearly wind-up of appraisals, where managers pretend to listen, staff make up development goals and the detailed work of fiction is filed away for next year, never to be looked at again.

Work, let's face it, for most of us is a pain hence the name 'work', the clue is in the title and we don't need patronising euphemisms like 'Human Resources'; the pay cheque turning up in bank account will do just fine. We're grown ups; we can handle reality and for those times when we can't there's always alcohol.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Open Letter

This is an open letter or public appeal if you like on behalf of mobile phone users in the South East of England.

Dear Person in Charge of BT Openzone

FUCK....OFF!!! Seriously, just fuck off! Stop hijacking everyone's wi-fi enabled devices with your stupid service. We're sitting at home, using a laptop and then suddenly BT Openzone blocks out our own wireless connection and directs us to your overpriced piece of crap. Do you find this is a good way to gain customers and win brand loyalty? I mean why stop at just taking over my phone or my laptop, why not kidnap my wife and ransom her in return for changing service providers? Burgle my mother's house when she's away and I can buy back her things in exchange for subscribing to your call minding service.

I realise it must be difficult trying to run a profitable business where you've lost your monopoly on landlines, although  of course BT still takes £140 off me a year for the fixed line it installed perhaps twenty years ago. I trust my cables are not just humble fibre optic lines. At that rate, I expect nothing less than gold or platinum, perhaps encased in mahogany. And what great value your wi-fi hijack service is, £6 for 90 minutes or £10 a day, especially when within 100 metres of my flat there are 3 pubs and cafes that all offer free wi-fi. It is a real a mystery why I have passed on your highly competitive rates.

Whoever you are in charge of BT Openzone, I would like to make a simple suggestion: try making a decent product or service that somebody actually wants and then advertise its unique appeal. It is, I admit, a radical idea and not something BT has tried before, but you never know.

Meanwhile, all across London living rooms reverberate to the shout of 'Oh for fuck's sake' as your service wipes the wireless password from our phones, laptops and PDAs. You do at least have brand recognition. However, not all publicity is good publicity - just ask Charlie Sheen.

Yours

A User of Wi-Fi Services who does not like being digitally mugged.

Sunday 19 June 2011

Sick Finance

Three years after the financial doomsday device was activated, JK wonders if you silly primates have learned any lessons and why no one has important has gone to jail.  Here's how it works: if you are a young black man mugging people in the street taking say £20 a time, the police will catch you and you will probably go to prison. But if you are rich, white, wearing a suit and the money you steal is in the hundred millions or billions, then you get a bail out from the tax payer and bonuses go back to normal. The amazing power of being rich and white. Don't forget, the financial crisis, was not accident or something that just happened.  The crisis was the product of corrupt, amoral, greedy men who changed banking from funding productive enterprises to making insane bets with other people's money and when it all came crashing down, they took tax payers's cash. This is not private enterprise, it is not even socialism for the rich:  it is a shakedown, Tony Soprano style.What's worse is we know who the guilty men are and some are still in post.

The really strange thing is that we fell with for this bullshit once, fair enough, but we're falling for it again. It's like going back to a card shark's table, hoping this time he won't fleece you. Worse still,  a strange alternate history is being written where it was all the fault of the regulators. Some right wing cranks in the States even claim Bill Clinton is really responsible, as he promote home loans to the poor or subprime as they charmingly called. Baboom! A conjuring trick which distracts the audience from the real villains with as much intellectual depth as the junk paper the banks misold by the billions. Can you think of any area of business that would say it is not our fault we tricked investors, lied to shareholders, overpaid our staff, mislead the regulators and engaged in activities that are fraud in all but name, but none of this is our responsibility - you have to stop us. Imagine if you went to a restaurant that poisoned your food and the chef said I can't help I just hate customers, unless there is someone from the health inspectorate standing next to me, I will put rat poison in the soup.  You'll spot the tiny logical flaw in this argument: banks claim markets are self regulating and need light supervision, except for 2008 when they cause more damage than a war, then it's all the government's fault for not stopping them. We win, you lose and fuck you for even questioning our motives or integrity.

So what is the answer. Don't bother looking to our current leadership for policies. David Cameron and George Osborne believe a free market is giving large corporations and financial interests tax breaks, like the disgraceful tax dodge Osbourne gave multinationals in February this year which allows them to bring money from tax havens avoiding UK tax. Free enterprise is their minds means a free for all for powerful, dominant interests and witness the results - financial meltdown, stagnant growth, rising inequality and social polarisation. It's not surprising that two men who have never worked for money or run a business don't get it (minding shop for your multi-millionaire dad does not count George). They fail to appreciate what a free market really should mean - free from distortion, monopoly practise, tax dodging and special influence. The banks are the most powerful lobby group and have taken over the debate so that what is the good for the City is also apparently good for Britain, when the exact opposite if often true -  our world already is starting to resemble a ghastly cartoon of capitalism from a Soviet poster. Our living standards are not rising, by  most indicators we are going backwards. But the top 1%, or even 0.5% of the population is doing very well.  We are not in this together, Dave, and spare us the cod philosophy of sacrifice and collective effort, it's like listening to a public school boy stoner on a beach in Kerala waxing lyrical about the nobility of Indian poverty. Empty, empty phrases spouted by a man who has floated upwards on a cushion of money.

The rotten core of this problem is over mighty finance who need to go back to being boring bean counters. Banks are inherently fragile and unstable business, which is why they spend so much money persuading you about how solid they are - big offices, smart suits, all the theatre of respectability. To control this risk, you don't want alpha males anywhere near the keys to the safe, because they will bet it all on roulette, whilst snorting gargantuan mounds of cocaine and hiring bevies of women who charge more by the hour than most people earn in a week. No one gets richer in this process apart from bankers, Porsche dealers and high class madams.

When Bob Diamond of Barclays said it was time to stop banker bashing and Goldman Sachs Senior Vampire Blankfein claimed he was doing God's work, the really frightening thing is these men believed what they said. No lessons learned, no remorse, no shame, but it's time to banish these ghouls back to the shadows where they belong.  Of course they have to believe this garbage, because otherwise when they look in the mirror they would see a monster, who has sucked wealth off the productive economy and entire life would have been better if he had never existed at all. Keep saying that mantra guys, it might keep your conscience at bay for a while, but JK wonders in the middle of the night, when they wake up all alone, do they have a moment of realisation - the alcoholic's moment of sobriety. When Adair Turner said much of this financial activity was socially useless, he was being too kind. Socially useless is more akin to an ill-advised business venture that goes nowhere - the sort of pointless hat shops you see last about 6 months in posh parts of town where Fennella has persuaded Daddykins to front the money - whereas the banks behaviour was socially toxic, closer to sowing landmines in a children's playground.  JK wants to you ask yourself a simple question, if all the these overpaid, egomaniacs had done something else for a living, where would we be now....Oh that's' right, about £150 billion better off and counting. Turns out the biggest damage to Western civilisation was not Al Qaida's 9/11, it was nerds in suits.

So apologies if this week is a little light on laughs, sometimes pure rage is the only correct response. The genie of finance must go back into the bottle or else things will get really nasty. Banker bashing is only words and name calling now, but what if the 99% of the population decided to settle scores with these crooks. There's so many more of us than them, they should start practising their sorry faces. Or else.

For more information, you must watch this film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film)

Monday 13 June 2011

Protecting Children

Welcome to overblown media panic, the June edition 2011. Our subject is the sexualisation of children, which I'm sure you will all agree is a bad thing, unless your name is Paul Francis Gadd (Gary Glitter). Apparently much that is wrong with Britain is the attempt by wicked companies and advertisers to turn pre-pubescents into gyrating junior pole dancers. JK does wonder if Stripper Barbie, the Belle de Jour children's pillowcases and My Little Pony Horse Brothel were a step to far. The tricks horses do should be trotting in unison, not dressed in in PVC nurses uniforms.

It's all started by a report prepared by the Mothers Union - an interesting organisation that isn't a union and whose Chief Executive, Reg Bailey, is a man.  David Cameron is all in favour of the proposals - of course the animated shop dummy would be supportive, a man who resembles a regency painting of a Duke only with less depth of character than the canvas he's painted on. In a desperate attempt to live down his Bullingdon days, Dave will do or say anything to prove he has moral worth. One question has always troubled JK - when those Bullingdon boys were prancing round Oxford in blue velvet tailcoats like braying bell ends, where was a bunch of vicious bike chain-wielding hoodlums when you needed them?

JK digresses, though it's hard to shake an image of Boris Johnson being forced to eat his own bow tie by a group of street toughs...ah we can but dream. So the alleged issue is the destruction of our children's innocence. It all sounds very familiar. Back in the early 1980s, when New York was gripped by gang violence and a crack epidemic, people blamed the breakdown on society on films like Driller Killer. By the same weird logic, as in no logic at all, lad's mags are 'a problem'. Retailers will be encouraged to sell the likes of FHM  and Nuts in brown paper covers. It is understandable that their journalism should be treated like waste paper fit for recycling as their writing compromises hitting cut and paste on copy  from PR firms pushing some car, watch, suit or stupid gizmo that nobody wants or needs. Maybe a City Boy out of his tree of Columbian talc would buy an exact replica of Doctor No's chair for £4000, but for the rest of us these magazines are mostly adverts interspersed with ladies not wearing very much. The  real question however is this: does looking at picture of Holly Willoughby in her underwear lead to end of civilisation?

The answer in case you were in any doubt is no. Lads mags may be puerile and silly, but they are mostly harmless. What's more like most magazines, their circulation is on the wane. The internet, that vast repository of naked ladies, is just too powerful and costs nothing to access. However, JK feels that as usual politicians and campaigners missed the real problem on newspaper stands. If we are concerned about actual harm to impressionable minds, then what about women's magazines that pump an endless stream of unattainable body images into young girls' minds. Technically the body shapes are obtainable if you are a 13 year old boy dressed like a girl or an adult woman who never eats, or if she does, it's half a lettuce leaf (organic naturally) once every alternate Tuesday which she then promptly throws up into her toilet, a crystal skull designed by Damien Hirst.   If you want to help your children, then get them playing sport, eating a balanced diet and leave the stick-thin, chain-smoking, coke-tooting, flight-attendant-assaulting, lollipop-head models on the middle shelf along with their alcoholic, anti-Semitic designers.



Friday 3 June 2011

The Man

When Lou Reed sang about 'the man', he was talking about a heroin dealer with poor timekeeping - one little discussed benefit of legalisation of drugs is the improvement in punctuality. The other man is JK's subject this week, he can take many guises but the ultimate incarnation is moobed uber git Simon Cowell who insists on displaying his hairy C-cups at every opportunity. You primates should be glad that the police are investigating the malicious article placed on Just Paste It, claiming contest rigging. Protecting the interests of a media mogul should always take precedence over investigating serious crimes against  little people, by which I don't mean Snow White's helpers but regular folks without expensive lawyers. 

In the sixties, there was a huge cultural rebellion against the man, fuelling one of the greatest artistic and cultural blooms of all time whose effects have changed lives forever. Incidentally if you don't know who or what the man is, then use the same question for working out who is the annoying friend in your social group. If you're unsure, bad luck, it's you. Likewise, if you don't want to fight the man, you either are him,  one of his minions or you buy what he's pushing. Of course, not everything the sixties producing was worth keeping, tie dye shirts for example are only acceptable clothing if you and all your friends take a lot of acid or your name is Hugo, your Dad is a hedgie and you're taking a Gap Yah. Yet the music was a force for change, escapism, love, contemplation, a chance for all of us to connect with something other than spreadsheets, car finance and fitted kitchens. Music was magical. Then came Simon Cowell and the juggernaut of X-Factor, crushing all before it. 

JK blames the Great British Public because when you were offered a pact with the devil you signed on the dotted line, except in this case the devil doesn't have all the best tunes, he has housewife friendly crooning that sounds worse than the foxes fucking in my garden. (Fox love making must be the most unpleasant sound on the planet, second only to the second Hearsay album. Then again, maybe the foxes like it, the noises I mean, not the album, they might be dumb animals, they're not completely stupid). Perhaps you did not realise that the price of something decent to watch on Saturday night was the destruction of music as an art form, the small print was very small and it was only a talent show. And now look what you've unleashed, a vampire has been invited over the cultural threshold sucking the blood out of music's beating heart, leaving only zombie performers - warbling meat puppet karaoke for the brain dead. The music business has managed to achieve its long term aim of removing the music bit, much like Hollywood has abandoned film making in favour of extended merchandise adverts. At some point, the studio executives are going to reach the bottom of the comic book stack in their offices and start making films again. Thor was that really necessary, seriously, was it the last in the pile under the Green Hornet? Directed by Brannagh....Ken, I hope the fee was worth your soul. Although Pirates of the Caribbean was based on a theme park ride, so we may yet see Big Thunder Mountain in the cinemas. Alternatively execs could cut to the chase and make a film based on MacDonald's Happy Meals about the adventures of a crime fighting piece of reconstituted chicken, called Nugget and his telepathic milkshake sidekick, Strawberry, a pot of sugar and fat that can read minds. Hold that thought, I must email my agent, I feel a film pitch coming on. 

There's no point blaming Mr Cowell, you might as well blame a shark for turning up its nose up at a lentil bake. This mess is a collective cluster fuck, caused by our overwhelming desire to all watch the same TV show and talk about it at water coolers at work. In fairness, Brits tend to talk about it in pubs or loitering outside reception having a cigarette,  yet the point still stands. You don't have to ring the premium numbers, you don't have to vote for these bland balladeers, you don't have to watch. What about having sex with your partner or for singletons, yourself, it's less degrading. Failing that, rent a film, switch to Michael Macintyre's Roadshow on Catch Up TV if you insist, he's a nice chap and there's lots of comedians on it who have noticed men and women are different. But, if there's any part of you that loves music as an art form, if your skin comes up in goosebumps when you hear a favourite song, if you believe music is more than something playing in hotel lobbies to keep the guests non-violent, it's not too late. 

Don't tune in. Don't turn on. Switch Off. Save yourself 40 pence per minute. Save music. 

Peace out.